Following in the Footsteps of the Princes in the Tower

Introduction

In The Daughter of Time, the 1951 novel by the celebrated crime and mystery writer Josephine Tey, a cynical, soon-to-be-retired police officer named Alan Grant, recovering in hospital from an operation, decides to use his experience as a criminologist to investigate one of the most notorious supposed crimes in history: whether or not King Richard III was guilty of the murder of his two young nephews, Edward and Richard Plantagenet, the boys known as ‘The Princes in the Tower’. He starts off with some detailed reading about the Wars of the Roses, the fifteenth-century civil wars that reached a conclusion soon after the princes’ disappearance. Grant ‘tried to make head or tail’ of the wars, Tey tells us, but ‘he failed. Armies marched and counter-marched. York and Lancaster succeeded each other as victors in a bewildering repetition. It was as meaningless as watching a crowd of dodgem cars bumping and whirling at a fair.’

In many ways the hapless Inspector Grant was barking up the wrong tree, in his emphasis on the Wars of the Roses as a key to understanding the fate of the princes. Although this long, complex and bloody conflict undoubtedly shaped the events that led to their imprisonment and disappearance, their ultimate fate was the result of a power struggle within one of the warring families – the House of York – rather than yet another episode of the in-fighting between the rival Houses of York and Lancaster. Inspector Grant really only needed to absorb a brief understanding of the Wars of the Roses to appreciate the historical context to Richard III seizing the throne in 1483 and possibly murdering his nephews.

Such a summary might run something like this: The Wars of the Roses erupted in 1455 as a response to the weak rule of King Henry VI, which revived interest in the rival claims to the throne of a nobleman, Richard, the third Duke of York (the grandfather of the princes in the Tower). The two opposing factions became known as the House of Lancaster (as Henry VI was a descendant of John of Gaunt, the First Duke of Lancaster and the third surviving son of Edward III) and the House of York (as Richard of York was descended from Edmund Langley, first Duke of York, the fourth surviving son of Edward III). Historians also point to the social and financial legacy of the Hundred Years War, which saw many English nobles disaffected by the loss of their holdings in continental Europe, as a contributory cause of the wars.

The conflict dragged on for thirty years. In the opening stages Richard, Duke of York’s son, Edward, Earl of March, the princes’ father, defeated and imprisoned Henry VI and was crowned Edward IV. Nine years later in 1470 the situation was reversed when Edward was deposed by Henry’s Lancastrian forces. Edward swiftly regained control of the crown from Henry, imprisoned him and possibly ordered his murder, and then ruled until his own somewhat untimely death in 1483. The crisis that engulfed the princes came as a result of arguments concerning Edward IV’s will, and who should rule during the minority of his son, Edward V, who acceded to the throne at the age of just 12. Of the two factions – Edward IV’s widow Elizabeth on one side, and his brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester on the other – Richard emerged as eventual victor, and was crowned King Richard III, having declared, Edward V and his younger brother Richard – by then languishing in the Tower of London – barred from the throne as a result of their supposed illegitimacy. Richard III’s brief rule ended just two years later, when a new Lancastrian claimant, Henry Tudor, defeated him at the Battle of Bosworth Field, which brought the thirty-year conflict to its conclusion. By that time the two princes had disappeared from public view.

Whether they were murdered  – by Richard III, by his successor Henry VII, or by agents acting for these monarchs with or without their blessing, or whether one or both survived to assume a new identity in adulthood  – is the subject of many books. But not this one. It is not difficult to see why authors and commentators from the 1480s onwards have attempted to claim (definitively) that they know what happened to the princes: the circumstances surrounding their disappearance remain the most compelling mystery in English history. Alison Weir, whose 1992 book Richard III and the Princes in the Tower firmly pins the blame on Richard III, considers the princes’ fate to be ‘a tale rich in drama, intrigue, treason, plots, judicial violence, scandal and infanticide … a mystery, a moral tale, and – above all – a gripping story.’ At the heart of this story is the ‘boy king’, Edward V, who reigned more briefly than any English king since the Norman Conquest: just twenty-seven days, from 10 April to 25 June 1483. His coronation was twice postponed and he was never crowned. Although we cannot say anything with certainty about his death, we know much more about him than any other boy of his time. Moreover, he and his younger brother have been cast by history as symbols rather than living, breathing beings. They have been portrayed as innocent lives caught up in a deadly game of power politics, by a host of historians, biographers, playwrights and novelists  – beginning with Thomas More (Richard III’s first biographer) and William Shakespeare (whose play Richard III drew heavily from More’s biography).

A survey and discussion of how novelists and playwrights have depicted the lives of the two princes, and have told the story of their imagined fates, is one aim of this book. Moreover, though, this book seeks to look at the princes’ story in a way that has not been considered before: through the places associated with them during their lives. They were the sons of a reigning monarch and one of them became a monarch himself. Not surprisingly they grew up in castles and palaces and their lives are commemorated in a number of churches. Although some places associated with them are now gone – such as the monastery in Shrewsbury where Prince Richard was born, and the Palace of Westminster in London where both of them were brought up, at various stages of their lives – many locations survive, most particularly the Tower of London, where they were imprisoned, Ludlow Castle in Shropshire, where Edward Plantagenet spent much of his life, and Westminster Abbey, where a tomb inscribed with their names purports to be their place of burial. Whilst this book does not seek to shed any new or radical light on the princes’ fate, it is hoped that through accounts of the places associated with them – from London and Kent to Shropshire, the English Midlands, and modern-day Belgium – a greater understanding of their lives and legacy can be gleaned.

Chapter One

Westminster: Sanctuary, Palace and Abbey

In the Middle Ages – as now – Westminster lay at the heart of English politics. Its royal palace was where parliament sat and where the monarch  – who underwent an elaborate anointing ceremony known as a coronation, in the adjacent Abbey  – presided over his court. Not surprisingly, in a story of political intrigue and the ruthless pursuit of ultimate power, Westminster crops up time and again in the story of the Princes in the Tower. Edward Plantagenet, the older of the two princes, was born here – or, more specifically, in the part of the abbey precincts that provided sanctuary for those in peril, which was the situation that had befallen his mother in November 1470 at the time of his birth. He then lived in the neighbouring Palace of Westminster until his household was removed to Ludlow in Shropshire when he was 3 years old. For the rest of his life he made frequent visits to the palace, when he would have been reunited with his younger brother Richard, whose permanent home this was. Today the palace’s great hall (now known as Westminster Hall) is the best-known remaining part of the great palace of England’s medieval kings. But a lesser-known part that remains is the undercroft of St Stephen’s Chapel, the church that played host to one of the more extraordinary events in the lives of the two princes, namely the wedding of 4-year-old Richard Plantagenet to his equally young bride, Anne Mowbray. As for Westminster Abbey itself, it is the place of burial not only of the princes – though there’s a great deal of scepticism as to whether the remains in their tomb are actually who they claim to be – but also a number of others directly or indirectly connected with their lives. These include their sister Elizabeth, her husband Henry VII, who some claim was their murderer; Edward Plantagenet’s chamberlain Sir Thomas Vaughan; Richard’s marriage partner, Anne Mowbray; and Thomas Millyng, the abbot of Westminster who gave Edward’s mother sanctuary when she gave birth, and whose residence adjacent to the Abbey was known as Cheyneygates.

The magnificent western facade of Westminster Abbey dates from the mid eighteenth century. The arched windows of the medieval Jerusalem Chamber, where Edward Plantagenet was probably born, are visible bottom right.

Cheyneygates: the birth of Edward Plantagenet in 1470

In September 1464, King Edward IV gathered his most prominent nobles around him at the great abbey at Reading, some forty miles west of London. At that time Reading Abbey, a foundation of King Henry I, was one of the great religious houses of England; today its ruins lie a short walk away from the shops and offices at the heart of this busy but rather bland county town. Once the king was sat in front of the nobles, he made the shocking announcement that he had recently married.

His new bride was a woman named Elizabeth Woodville; her family were minor Northamptonshire gentry. The announcement drew gasps of surprise from the assembled nobles, for more than one reason. First, the wedding had taken place in relative secrecy. Second, not only was the king’s new bride of comparatively low birth, she was also a Lancastrian whose first husband, Sir John Grey of Groby, had been killed fighting at Towton some three years previously (in what was possibly the largest pitched battle ever fought on English soil). For months prior to this shock announcement, the king’s powerful cousin, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, known as the ‘kingmaker’, had been beavering away behind the scenes to arrange for Edward to marry a foreign princess – namely Bona of Savoy, sister-in-law to the King of France. Now, with King Edward’s announcement, Warwick had been humiliated. The wound cut deep  – and then cut deeper over the years that followed, as the king continued to sideline Warwick. Seething at Edward’s secrecy and the lightning-fast rise of the upstart Woodvilles, in the summer of 1469 Warwick forged an alliance with Edward’s power-hungry brother George, Duke of Clarence. The two men gathered a force of mercenaries together on the continent and sailed with them to England, engaging Edward at Edgecote, fought just to the southwest of Northampton – at which the king, remarkably, was taken prisoner, and was then kept in a succession of castles. Warwick had it put about that Edward was the illegitimate son of an English archer, named Blaybourne, and that this meant he had no right to the throne, and in an act of vindictiveness towards the queen and her family he also had Elizabeth’s father and brother beheaded.

Warwick found that he could not rule through an imprisoned king, and trouble on the Scottish border forced him to release Edward in early 1470. But he was not finished yet: in March of that year Warwick orchestrated another outbreak of violence that culminated in his defeat at Empingham in the East Midlands. He fled to France with Clarence and began to plot another invasion of England – this time with a major twist: Warwick was now siding with the Lancastrians. His aim was to see his hated foe Edward deposed, and the restoration to power of the former Lancastrian king Henry VI, who had been a prisoner in the Tower of London since 1464. When news reached London of the planned invasion, Queen Elizabeth was pregnant and it was vital that she sought out a place of safety in which to give birth. ‘Be brave … be a queen,’ her husband King Edward tells her in Philippa Gregory’s novel The White Queen  – Elizabeth being the ‘white queen’ of the title (an allusion to the white rose emblem of the House of York). ‘Go to the Tower with the girls and keep yourself safe,’ he continues. ‘Then I can fight and win and come home to you.’ The invasion duly came on 13 September 1470, by which time Elizabeth had indeed moved into the palatial royal apartments in the Tower of London. Within a couple of weeks Warwick and Clarence were in London, while Edward and his other brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, were desperately trying to raise an army in the Low Countries to oust the invaders. The dire situation now meant that it was unsafe for the queen to remain even in the security of the Tower. On 4 October she took to the Thames in secret and travelled by barge, under the cover of darkness, upstream to Westminster Abbey, where she would seek sanctuary from Warwick and the frenzied mobs that supported him  – and where she would give birth. Warwick and Clarence took control of the Tower two days later.

In the Middle Ages every church in England granted a general right of sanctuary to felons, who were entitled to receive protection from arrest for forty days within its walls. When their time was up they had to leave the kingdom and agree not to return, or face arrest. Special rights, over and above these, and granted by royal charter, applied to at least twenty-two churches, of which Westminster Abbey was one. These rights gave sanctuary dwellers immunity from capture and prosecution for life, even to those accused of high treason. Although sanctuaries were regarded as holy places to be treated with reverence, there were many instances of them being breached  – most notoriously, by King Edward IV himself, who in 1471 entered Tewkesbury Abbey and dragged out the Lancastrians who had sought sanctuary within its walls. It comes as no surprise that the chronicler Dominic Mancini, an Italian monk who came to England in the retinue of the Bishop of Vienne and whose report entitled The Occupation of the Throne of England by Richard III is an important source of information for this period, wrote that ‘sanctuaries are of little avail against the royal authority.’

Those seeking sanctuary at Westminster Abbey installed themselves not in the Abbey but in a dedicated building situated in the northwestern corner of the Abbey precincts, at the end of St Margaret’s Churchyard. This sanctuary building dated from the time of Edward the Confessor, who had built the first stone church at Westminster. It was cruciform in layout, its stout oak door giving access to two chapels, an upstairs one for debtors and a lower one for common felons. Some writers have maintained that this is where Queen Elizabeth sought sanctuary in October 1470, and where her son Edward Plantagenet was born the following month. These include Agnes Strickland, the author of the seminal Lives of the Queens of England, published in several volumes during the course of the 1840s. In Lives Strickland describes Westminster’s sanctuary as a ‘gloomy building … a massive structure, of sufficient strength to withstand a siege’. This sanctuary building was demolished – with great difficulty, as it was so massive – in 1750, and no trace of it remains. Middlesex Guildhall, a grand nineteenth-century edifice that is now home to the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, stands today in its place; appropriately, it is surrounded by streets known as Little Sanctuary and Broad Sanctuary.

The right of sanctuary at Westminster was not limited to the sanctuary building. It also extended to the buildings surrounding the Abbey and its churchyard. Given this, it seems unlikely that the Queen of England would have chosen to give birth surrounded by common felons and debtors. Instead she probably lodged with the Abbot of Westminster, Thomas Millyng, in his house, Cheyneygates, situated beside the great west door of the Abbey. (Millyng is buried along with three other fifteenth-century abbots of Westminster in the Chapel of John the Baptist on the north side of Westminster Abbey, just across from its most sacred and oldest part, the Shrine of Edward the Confessor.) Cheyneygates itself still survives, or parts of it do. Today it takes the form of a rambling warren of hushed, carpeted corridors that link various public and private rooms spread over a number of levels, all of which cling limpet-like to the southwestern flanks of the Abbey. The Dean of Westminster  – a successor to the medieval abbots – still lives in the private apartments in Cheyneygates, while the public rooms are given over to various abbey functions and meetings. Access is from an entrance in Dean’s Yard, the great courtyard that adjoins the Abbey on its southern side (though none of Cheyneygates is open to the public). The buildings themselves range in age from the fourteenth to the twentieth century; the most recent as the result of extensive rebuilding after a direct hit from an incendiary bomb during the Second World War. Thankfully the most glorious room in Cheyneygates, known as the Jerusalem Chamber, where the Dean and Chapter conduct their meetings to this day, remained unscathed during the wartime inferno. In 1470 this was probably the main room placed at the disposal of Queen Elizabeth when she sought sanctuary; in addition she would have had use of Cheyneygates’ Great Hall, a privy chamber, and the courtyard, where