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Authors: Mark P Donnelly
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arrest and imprisonment of Richard’s heir, the Earl of Warwick; and just as quickly rumours sprang up that Warwick had escaped. But Tower records show he was still there a year later when Margaret of Burgundy sent a cask of wine to him. Along with the new rumours about Warwick were the continuing rumours concerning the fate of the young King Edward and his brother Prince Richard.
Strangely, Henry Tudor did not seem concerned about the boys’ fate, nor did he accuse Richard of having done away with them. Had he wanted to, in the absence of the boys themselves, he could have invented any number of stories about their disappearance that would have helped blacken Richard’s name, but he assiduously avoided the subject. This alone is odd, considering the pains he took to accuse Richard of almost every other imaginable crime.
Four years after Henry VII took the throne there were a series of riots in North Yorkshire, which had been Richard’s seat of government during his tenure as the Lieutenant of the North. To quell the riots, Henry selected the Earl of Northumberland; the same man who, along with Lord Stanley, had betrayed Richard at Bosworth. At Cocklodge, just outside the village of Thirsk, Northumberland was set upon by a mob that seized him, drove off his retainers, and meticulously murdered the earl. Obviously there were those who still believed Richard was not the ogre he was being portrayed as by King Henry and the rumourmongers in London.
The next, and possibly the strangest, development in the story came to light with the arrest of Sir James Tyrell, former ‘knight of the body’ to the late King Richard. Arrested on unrelated charges, Tyrell apparently confessed under torture to engineering the murder of the princes. Oddly, his confession was never made public during Henry VII’s lifetime and was only brought to light by Sir Thomas More, during the reign of Henry VIII. According to More, Tyrell said he hired two men, Miles Forest, one of King Edward’s keepers, and a groom named John Dighton, to carry out the murders. Tyrell supposedly obtained a warrant to receive the keys to the Garden Tower from the Tower Governor, Sir Robert Brackenbury, and passed them on to Forest and Dighton. Creeping into the boys’ room late at night, Forest and Dighton smothered them with their pillows, hauled their naked bodies to the Wakefield Tower and buried them under a heap of stones. Supposedly, their bodies were later recovered by a priest and reburied as near to consecrated ground as possible; beneath a staircase leading into the Chapel of St John.
If this evidence was available to Henry VII, it would have provided the ‘smoking gun’ he needed to prove Richard III a child murderer and a usurper. Why did he not use this evidence? There are two possible explanations: (1) he knew it was not true – and we will come back to this possibility later – and (2) he did not know of Tyrell’s confession. Why? Because More invented it years later to vilify Richard?
Sir Thomas More is unquestionably one of the most respected men of the Tudor period, but he was, at least at this time, doggedly devoted to Henry VIII and happy to go to any lengths to slander the Yorkists. Certainly, it was More who first transformed Richard from the physically attractive little man we met earlier into the deformed creature we meet in Shakespeare. More described Richard as ‘little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crook-backed, his left shoulder much higher than his right, hard favoured of visage. . . . He was malicious, wrathful and envious, from before his birth [and] ever forward.’
At this period, physical deformities were still believed to be a sign of spiritual corruption, and making Richard physically repugnant would have indicated that he was also morally bankrupt. It was almost certainly from More’s malign description that Shakespeare created the psychotic monstrosity who appears in his 1593 play, A Tragical History of Richard III .
Strangely, Henry Tudor did not seem concerned about the boys’ fate, nor did he accuse Richard of having done away with them. Had he wanted to, in the absence of the boys themselves, he could have invented any number of stories about their disappearance that would have helped blacken Richard’s name, but he assiduously avoided the subject. This alone is odd, considering the pains he took to accuse Richard of almost every other imaginable crime.
Four years after Henry VII took the throne there were a series of riots in North Yorkshire, which had been Richard’s seat of government during his tenure as the Lieutenant of the North. To quell the riots, Henry selected the Earl of Northumberland; the same man who, along with Lord Stanley, had betrayed Richard at Bosworth. At Cocklodge, just outside the village of Thirsk, Northumberland was set upon by a mob that seized him, drove off his retainers, and meticulously murdered the earl. Obviously there were those who still believed Richard was not the ogre he was being portrayed as by King Henry and the rumourmongers in London.
The next, and possibly the strangest, development in the story came to light with the arrest of Sir James Tyrell, former ‘knight of the body’ to the late King Richard. Arrested on unrelated charges, Tyrell apparently confessed under torture to engineering the murder of the princes. Oddly, his confession was never made public during Henry VII’s lifetime and was only brought to light by Sir Thomas More, during the reign of Henry VIII. According to More, Tyrell said he hired two men, Miles Forest, one of King Edward’s keepers, and a groom named John Dighton, to carry out the murders. Tyrell supposedly obtained a warrant to receive the keys to the Garden Tower from the Tower Governor, Sir Robert Brackenbury, and passed them on to Forest and Dighton. Creeping into the boys’ room late at night, Forest and Dighton smothered them with their pillows, hauled their naked bodies to the Wakefield Tower and buried them under a heap of stones. Supposedly, their bodies were later recovered by a priest and reburied as near to consecrated ground as possible; beneath a staircase leading into the Chapel of St John.
If this evidence was available to Henry VII, it would have provided the ‘smoking gun’ he needed to prove Richard III a child murderer and a usurper. Why did he not use this evidence? There are two possible explanations: (1) he knew it was not true – and we will come back to this possibility later – and (2) he did not know of Tyrell’s confession. Why? Because More invented it years later to vilify Richard?
Sir Thomas More is unquestionably one of the most respected men of the Tudor period, but he was, at least at this time, doggedly devoted to Henry VIII and happy to go to any lengths to slander the Yorkists. Certainly, it was More who first transformed Richard from the physically attractive little man we met earlier into the deformed creature we meet in Shakespeare. More described Richard as ‘little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crook-backed, his left shoulder much higher than his right, hard favoured of visage. . . . He was malicious, wrathful and envious, from before his birth [and] ever forward.’
At this period, physical deformities were still believed to be a sign of spiritual corruption, and making Richard physically repugnant would have indicated that he was also morally bankrupt. It was almost certainly from More’s malign description that Shakespeare created the psychotic monstrosity who appears in his 1593 play, A Tragical History of Richard III .
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