there he was buried‘without
any pomp or solemn funeral’.
Five decades later the tomb was broken open when the friary was destroyed during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. To this
day, the bones that are said to have belonged to the little Princes in the Tower rest in honour in Westminster Abbey. But
sometime in the 1530s the bones of Richard III were thrown into a river in Leicestershire.
DOUBLE TROUBLE
1486-99
O N 18 JANUARY 1486 THE NEW KING HENRY VII, the twenty-eight-year-old victor of Bosworth, married nineteen-year-old Princess Elizabeth of York, the elder sister
of the tragic Princes in the Tower. Plotted by Henry’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, the marriage was a step towards mending
the bitter and bloodstained rift between the House of Lancaster and the House of York.
But the mysterious disappearance of the little princes had left a curious legacy. No one could be quite sure what had happened
to them — and, if they
had
been murdered, who was to blame. Despite the suspicion attaching to RichardIII, there were no bodies and no closure: the poison had not been drawn. For a dozen years England was haunted by conspiracy
theories made flesh. It was the age of the pretenders.
The first was Lambert Simnel, an Oxford tradesman’s son who became the tool of Richard Symonds, an ambitious local priest.
Symonds took his twelve-year-old protege to Ireland, claiming that Simnel was Edward, Earl of Warwick, the young nephew of
Richard III (see Wars of the Roses family tree, p. x). On Whit Sunday 1487‘King Edward VT’ was crowned by dissident Irish
noblemen in Dublin.
The real Edward was in the Tower of London. Henry had made it a priority to put Warwick away when he came to the throne, and
now he lost no time in bringing him out to be paraded through the streets of London. When Simnel and his Irish followers landed
at Furness in Lancashire later that June, Henry marched north to defeat them in a rerun of the previous years of disorder.
But the Tudor response in victory was a new departure. Instead of executing‘Edward VI’, Henry gave Simnel a job in the royal
kitchens, turning the spit that roasted the royal ox. The boy made such a good job of his duties as a scullion that he rapidly
earned promotion, rising to take care of Henry’s beloved hunting hawks and finishing up as royal falconer.
In his humane, rather humorous treatment of Lambert Simnel, Henry was making a point — this new king did not kill children.
He even spared the boy’s Svengali, Symonds, who had planned to have himself made Archbishop of Canterbury. But Henry might
have done better to be more severe,for within a few years he was confronted with another pretender. This one declared himself to be Richard, Duke of York, the
younger of the Princes in the Tower. Apparently, he had made a miraculous escape following his elder brother’s murder and
had now returned to claim the throne.
’King Richard IV’ — by this account, Henry’s brother-in-law — would later confess that he was, in fact, one Pierquin Wesbecque
(Perkin Warbeck) from Tournai in the Netherlands, the son of a boatman. But it suited all manner of people to believe he was
indeed the nephew of Richard III, and he did the rounds of Henry’s enemies and neighbours, being treated to banquets and hunting
excursions and given money to buy troops. King James IV of Scotland even found him an attractive wife, his own cousin Lady
Katherine Gordon.
This pretender’s six-year odyssey came to grief in the autumn of 1497, after a failed attempt to raise the West Country against
Henry. Captured at Beaulieu in Hampshire, he finally admitted his humble origins. But having heard his confession, Henry again
took a conciliatory line, inviting Warbeck and his charming Scottish wife to join his court. It was as if the King was enjoying
the fairytale himself. Even when Warbeck tried to escape the following summer, Henry was content merely to
Jeremy Blaustein
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David Lee Stone
Russell Blake
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Susan Leigh Carlton
Tara Dairman
Ted Wood
Unknown Author
Paul Levine