The Survival of the Princes in the Tower (eBook)

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Deconstructing the Myth

The most striking thing about the solid edifice of the story of Richard III’s guilt in the murder of his nephews is the shaky foundations on which it is built. William Shakespeare was writing a dramatic spectacle so had no desire to leave the matter ambiguous – he needed his audience to see Richard commit the ultimate evil act. However, one step back to the Tudor antiquaries and the foundations of Richard’s reputation reveals a less certain attitude. The earlier account of Sir Thomas More, begun around 1513, is equally unequivocal in accusing Richard of ordering this heinous act, but accepting More’s book at face value ignores several very important facts that should warn us against such blind reliance.

Just as it is possible to interpret Shakespeare’s Richard III as a political commentary on the events in England at the end of sixteenth century, so Thomas More’s writing should be read in a wider context than simple history as we may expect it to be written today. More’s other great work, Utopia, is far from a literal piece. It is an allegory, a vehicle for the discussion of a perfect society, which appears to consist of a world without private property that promotes religious freedom, euthanasia, divorce and married clergy, concepts that More demonstrably did not believe in. Sir Thomas was born in London in 1478, the son of a successful lawyer. He spent the years between the ages of 8 and 14 years old in the household of John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor to Henry VII. Morton had been the implacable enemy of Richard III and a key architect of Henry VII’s propulsion to the throne and it seems likely that More gleaned much about the old king from his mentor. The first moment in which Thomas came to prominence was in 1504 as a 26-year-old Member of Parliament. Trained as a lawyer, More made so eloquent a speech in Parliament against a tax of three-fifteenths requested by King Henry VII that the grant was reduced by around two-thirds. The idealistic lawyer’s victory saw his father imprisoned in the Tower and forced to pay a hefty fine for no obvious offence but his son’s open opposition to the Tudor government. If Thomas learned a lesson from this episode it was surely that such flagrant criticism was to be avoided.

Allegory was a literary style popular in Ancient Rome and used by writers such as Plato and Livy. The Cambridge Dictionary defines allegory as ‘a story, play, poem, picture, or other work in which the characters and events represent particular qualities or ideas that relate to morals, religion, or politics’. As a Renaissance man, Sir Thomas would have been interested in Roman classicism and allegory allowed a writer to direct criticism and comment at the establishment of the day in an indirect way that could always be denied. The device can be seen in More’s Utopia and other famous works over following centuries such as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and its use in other places by More should offer a note of caution when reading his account as literal history. It is important to also consider that More never completed his History of King Richard III. Just after detailing the murder of the Princes, More set down his pen and never returned to the work. When he started writing in 1513 he was serving as Undersheriff of London but was about to embark on a career in royal service as a close friend to Henry VIII that perhaps precluded even allegorical criticism of the government. Why snipe at it in writing when he could try to change the system from its very heart? That may, at least, have been the idealistic notion. We only know of More’s version of the events of 1483 because his nephew, William Rastell, edited and completed the story, publishing it in 1557, over twenty years after More’s execution. There was even a Continuation written by Richard Grafton, the Tudor antiquary, which continued More’s story to Henry Tudor’s victory at Bosworth. It is unclear how much Rastell changed More’s manuscript and he is a man we shall return to shortly.

What if, rather than ceasing his account because he was embarking on a career in service to Henry VIII, More had other reasons for stopping his writing? It is entirely possible that the research More carried out, including interviewing those alive in 1483, quickly uncovered the gaping holes in the monstrous version of the old king handed him by Archbishop Morton. This may have mattered less when the work is read as allegory, since in that case Richard III becomes a vehicle for the lessons of the work concerned with the dangers of tyranny and perhaps aimed at the new, young King Henry VIII, amongst whose first acts was the executions of Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley essentially for doing as they had been told by his father, Henry VII. There are clues that we are not meant to take More’s work literally. The very first line of the book is an error. ‘King Edward of that name the Fourth, after he had lived fifty and three years, seven months, and six days, and thereof reigned two and twenty years, one month, and eight days, died at Westminster the ninth day of April’. Edward IV in fact died nineteen days short of his forty-first birthday. A traditional interpretation would suggest that this would have been fact-checked later and corrected, but this comes from the same readers who seek to rely utterly on More’s account of the murder of the Princes. Would such a fastidious investigator really have guessed so precisely at an age? Might More not have added an ‘about’ to mitigate his possible error? One explanation is that More offered an immediate signpost to a knowledgeable reader that what followed was not a literal truth, but an allegorical, metaphorical exercise. It is perhaps interesting that Henry VII also died in April, in 1509 at the age of 52 after twenty-four years as king, coming far closer to More’s description than Edward IV does.

It is not necessary to rely entirely on setting aside More’s account as fiction with a hidden purpose in order to doubt the traditional story of the murder of the Princes in the Tower. One key feature of More’s version is his assertion that:

Sir James was indeed arrested in 1501 and executed in 1502 for treason as a result of assisting Edmund de la Pole, a nephew of Richard III, in his escape from England and through Calais to the Continent. Tyrell was not arrested for anything in relation the Princes in the Tower. There is no record of a confession nor even that he was questioned on the matter nearly twenty years after the event. It is interesting too that More also wrote that ‘Miles Forest at Saint Martin’s piecemeal rotted away; Dighton, indeed, walks on alive in good possibility to be hanged before he die; but Sir James Tyrell died at Tower Hill, beheaded for treason’. Yes, that’s right. More claims that John Dighton confessed to the act of killing Edward V and Richard, Duke of York alongside Tyrell and that, although Tyrell was executed, Dighton walked free and was still at liberty a decade later when More began writing. The traditional approach requires us to believe in a confession of which More’s assertion that it existed is the only evidence and that one of those who committed not only the double murder but a regicide too was allowed to walk free after his confession. It would be remarkable indeed if the Tudor government had mislaid such a critical document to their security after more than a decade of threats to it and more remarkable still if Henry VII had allowed a killer of a king and a duke to walk free. It is almost unthinkable that Henry’s queen, Elizabeth of York, would not have wanted justice for the man who smothered her brothers to death.

The other key element of More’s story is the burial of the bodies of the Princes. More wrote that following the murder by Forest and Dighton, ‘they laid their bodies naked out upon the bed and fetched Sir James to see them. Who, upon the sight of them, caused those murderers to bury them at the stair-foot, meetly deep in the ground under a great heap of stones.’ Crucially, More continues that when Tyrell reported what had been done to a grateful Richard, the king ‘allowed not, as I have heard, the burying in so vile a corner, saying that he would have them buried in a better place because they were a King’s sons’ so that ‘they say that a priest of Sir Robert Brackenbury took up the bodies again and secretly buried them in a place that only he knew and that, by the occasion of his death, could never since come to light.’ More claims that his story comes directly from Tyrell and Dighton’s confessions, which he says are ‘well known’, yet the details of the burial are couched in terms of ‘as I have heard’ and ‘they say’ which gives it an air of oral tradition, the reliability of which More cannot be certain of. Nor is he willing to commit to his own story, yet the two positions appear mutually exclusive; either the detail came from a confession, or it is a story that...