The Lost King (7 page)

More grubby little events have occurred. A man called James Tyrrell was executed for the murder of my lovely boys seven years afterwards, but Henry had been hunting down all York supporters, and Tyrrell had served King Richard loyally throughout
his life. When he supported Edmund de la Pole, third Duke of Suffolk, as the leading Yorkist claimant to the throne, Henry arrested him and charged him with killing the princes. Tyrrell swore that he had nothing to do with it, but hours of torture in the Tower forced him to sign a confession.

Twice, boys have turned up whose supporters claim they are one of the lost princes, smuggled to safety. I did not see either of them, of course. I would have known in a flash if they were Edward or Richard, even after all these years. The first one, Lambert Simnel, was so young that they simply condemned him to work as a scullion in the castle kitchen. The other, Perkin Warbeck, was beheaded.

In all this, I am certain of only one thing. King Richard the Third, slight of stature though he was, stood head and shoulders above the rest of them. People in the north knew that. Bryn sent me a copy of the address that Archibald Whitelaw gave when welcoming Richard to York on 12
^th
September 1484, the year before Bosworth. He spoke of ‘your innate benevolence, your clemency, your liberality, your good faith, your supreme justice and your incredible greatness of heart'.

I keep that piece of paper tucked away in secret, together with another that I stole when copies were being smuggled round Ludlow. That one has words by Thomas Langton, Bishop of St David's. Richard, he said, ‘contents the people wherever he goes better than ever did any prince … God has sent him to us for the welfare of us all.'

We have not been noted for our kindness to those whom God sends.

The cutting short of King Richard's life leaves us diminished, but those of us who loved him are still warmed when we think of him, and we rage helplessly against the power-seeking that destroys good men and lovely boys. My children say people not yet born may have more sense, and learn to understand.

I hope they are right.

In this book, Lisa and her family are invented characters, as are the court servants. Throughout history, ‘common people' have watched and heard and understood what was going on, but they leave no trail of evidence behind them and their names are unknown. Carefully re-inventing them is the only way we can go back into an earlier time. All the events concerning the named, real people are true, though any writer today must sift the evidence very carefully. It is always possible that a contemporary account may have been written to the order of some powerful person, the facts selected or ignored for political purposes.

The riddle of the princes in the Tower has always posed this problem. Ever since the boys disappeared
in 1483, people have taken sides over the question of whether Richard III murdered his two young nephews. Those who believe he did – and there are many – can point to good company. Shakespeare showed Richard as an evil schemer, twisted in mind as well as body, and this image has persisted. The belief that he killed his nephews so that he himself would rule England has a simple, persuasive logic. Perceiving the fallacies that surround it demands a little more thought.

Henry VII killed Richard at the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Once on the throne, Henry began a systematic wiping-out of the Plantagenet family to which Richard had belonged. His son, Henry VIII, continued it. In 1541, fifty-six years after Bosworth, he ordered the beheading of Margaret Pole, a quiet lady now nearly 70 years old who had committed no crime except for being the daughter of King Richard's brother George, Duke of Clarence. Shakespeare was not born until 1564, but the persecution of any potential supporter of the Plantagenet line would have been common knowledge. He depicted ‘Richard Crookback' as a deformed villain, because he could not do otherwise.

The Tudor line came to an end with Elizabeth's death in 1603 and for the first time, dissenters dared to raise their voices. In 1619 George Buck wrote a book in Richard's support, and fresh thinking began to grow. Horace Walpole defended Richard's reputation in 1768, and in the twentieth century an increasing number of writers questioned the orthodox belief in his guilt. Many people, however, continue to believe the Tudor version.

As soon as Henry VII became king, he destroyed every copy of the
Titulus Regius
that he could find. That document was drawn up by Parliament (not by Richard as sometimes alleged), and constitutes official proof of Edward's previous marriage. One copy survived, so we know its contents. It states that Richard was forced to accept the throne, because his nephews had been declared illegitimate. Henry imposed severe penalties even for speaking of the document, and succeeded in pushing the dark old secret back into its box.

He had two good reasons for this.
Titulus Regius
not only proved Richard's claim to the throne, but meant that the young princes' sisters were also illegitimate – and the eldest of them was Henry's
own wife, a marriage eagerly sought by her mother, Elizabeth Woodville.

Almost every history written since that time has glossed over the fact that Edward IV was already married when he took Elizabeth Woodville as his wife. It has been dismissed as dubious hearsay, although the priest who conducted the marriage admitted in court that he had officiated at the private ceremony. After Richard's death, the Tudor spin-machine was assiduous in presenting its own version of the facts. Strangely, it did not at first allege that Richard had killed his nephews, though it would have been an ace card to play, blackening his reputation forever, as it did eventually. It must be asked why they overlooked this opportunity. There can be only two reasons – either the princes were still alive at that time, or the Tudors knew who had killed them and had not yet thought of blaming Richard.

Sir Thomas More's biography of Richard III was highly critical, and has been the basis for most of the later assumptions. But More, born in 1478, was only eight years old when Richard was crowned. He could not have been an eyewitness to the scenes he described. These come from accounts written by
More's master, John Morton, whom Henry appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in gratitude for his many services. Other chroniclers are equally dubious, as all of them were carrying out paid commissions for King Henry.

The whole case against Richard rests on the truth or untruth of the Tudor version of events. Henry VII's suppression of the
Titulus Regius
and of the secret that it exposed shows a desperate need to establish a different picture. Henry appointed chroniclers who were paid to write history as they were told to. Elizabeth Woodville was locked away in a convent for the rest of her life and could speak to nobody. The secret that had dominated Richard's entire life was thrust back in its box, where it has remained. With the X-ray vision of the 21st century, we should now be able to see through the closed lid.

This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published 2014 by
A & C Black
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP

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ISBN 978-1-4729-0441-6

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