The Lost King

by Alison Prince

  There is still silence about the boys. Surely, if they had been killed, rumours would have spread? The people who work at the Tower will have the same detailed knowledge of the place as we have of Ludlow. How could two bodies be smuggled out without their knowing? How could their cell be empty one morning without questions being asked? I still persuade myself that they are alive.

  Meanwhile, Henry Tudor has been gathering an army over there in France, preparing to cross the Channel again and invade England. There is going to be a war. I feel that all human kindness has gone. I fear for the future and for ourselves as well as for the helpless boys caught up in wicked schemes.

  Papa tells me not to distress myself, for I will have a baby of my own in the autumn, and the child growing inside me must not be disturbed by fretting and worry. But the prayer goes on in my mind.

  Dear Lord, if it be Thy Will...

  7th August 1485

  Henry has landed an army of three thousand men on the west coast of Wales, near Milford. It would have been quicker to cross the Channel to southern England, but Tom says three thousand men are not enough for a major battle. Henry aims to gather Welsh supporters as he marches through the country, because he himself is Welsh. The servants at the castle laugh at this, because as far as they are concerned, Henry is from France. He speaks English, it seems, but nobody has heard him say a word of Welsh. Quite a few have joined his army, all the same.

  King Richard was in the North when news of the invasion came. He has done wonderfully well there, settling the age-old quarrel with the marauding Scots and getting the border town of Berwick returned to England. His Council of the North is much respected. But he will have to gather an army together as fast as he can now and start on the long march south-westward, to meet his enemy.

  16th August 1485

  Henry and his troops have crossed the border into England. King Richard’s army is still on the road, making its way towards a town called Leicester. Soldiers from Northumberland and York are on the march as well, coming to join him. Stanley has formed a force of his own. He says he supports Richard, though everyone knows that he will go with whichever side he thinks will win.

  Annie said, ‘I hear Henry is no fighter. He skulks round the edge, they say, trying not to get his shoes dirty. That’s why Stanley is on Richard’s side. If anything goes wrong, though, he’ll turn like a flipped coin.’

  There is something awful about this slow moving of thousands of men from the west of Wales and from all over England, to a chosen place where they will meet other men then hack and slash at each other until one side is beaten. I try not to think about it. I stay at home now, in the little house Tom built, because my baby is due very soon. I clean and cook and tend the garden, and try to imagine the war is not happening.

  24th August 1485

  Annie is at our door, in tears.

  ‘He is dead, Lisa. They savaged him. Richard. Our King Richard. Oh, dear God.’

  We are in each other’s arms. The baby inside me moves uneasily as if it shares my distress.

  After a while Annie gently detaches herself. She mops her eyes and we sit down at the table.

  ‘A man came to the castle. He’d been at the battle. Still filthy. Richard was betrayed, Lisa.’

  ‘Stanley.’

  ‘Yes. Richard saw Henry watching while soldiers hacked and battered at each other. Perhaps he thought if he could kill him, it would bring the war to an end. He charged towards Henry with some good men but the mud was so deep, the horses were floundering and couldn’t get on. Richard dismounted and went for Henry on foot. He killed his standard-bearer and another man. Then Stanley saw he was alone and yelled for his men to attack him. Richard fought like a demon, the man who came said. But they were all round him, Lisa. He didn’t have a chance.’

  Annie takes a shuddering breath.

  ‘And the worst thing,’ she goes on. ‘When he was dead, they stripped him naked and slung him across a horse like a stag killed in a hunt. They took him into Leicester like that, for onlookers to see and hack at with their own swords, shouting and cheering. They dumped him in a church. We don’t even know – ’

  Her voice breaks and ends on a sob.

  ‘ – where he is to be buried.’

  Afterwards

  As I said at the start, it was a long time ago. Mama died the year after the Bosworth battle, but Papa still helps the people who need him.

  Annie left the castle, saying she would have nothing to do with ‘that murderer’ or his court. She had no job to go to, but Jane Shore came back to Ludlow with her adoring lawyer husband, and they took her on as a cook. Annie is shocked by Jane, though somehow she likes her.

  ‘What she got up to,’ she says. ‘Unbelievable. But we do have a laugh.’

  My two sweet daughters are almost young women now, and Huw, their younger brother, is as tall as Tom. He says he will keep the pages I have written and show them to children of his own one day. I tell him not to take anything for granted, but I like thinking of it.

  I know more now about what happened at Bosworth. On the night before the battle, Stanley told everyone he was ill in bed with the sweating sickness and would not be able to fight – but he was not ill at all. He was with Henry, planning battle tactics. Afterwards, when Richard had been killed and the fighting had ended, a soldier saw something glinting in a bush. It was the gold circlet Richard had worn over his helmet. Stanley snatched it from him and gave it to Henry, who crammed it over his own helmet and crowed that he was now King Henry the Seventh.

  He tried to confiscate all the property of Richard and the men who had fought for him, claiming that they were guilty of treason against himself as the ruling monarch. But Richard was the ruling monarch until the moment of his death, so any treason before that could only be against him, not Henry. Truth had ceased to matter, though. The confiscation request Henry put to Parliament gave the date of his kingship as the day before the Bosworth battle. A sharp-eyed clerk changed it to the correct one, thank goodness.

  The next thing was, Henry repealed Bishop Stillington’s confession that he had officiated at King Edward’s previous marriage. He declared the Titulus Regius an illegal document and forbade anyone to read it and burned every copy he could find.

  Papa was perplexed.

  ‘He must think the Titulus Regius simply set out Richard’s right to be king,’ he said. ‘Perhaps he does not read Latin. But it was also Parliament’s testimony that young Edward and Richard were illegitimate. In destroying that document, Henry has made it possible for Edward’s sons to inherit the throne. So their supporters may challenge Henry’s right to be king. Your lovely boys could yet be recognised as royal.’

  For one brief moment, the heavy certainty that they are dead lifted and I had a thrill of excitement – but Papa was frowning.

  ‘If Henry sees his mistake, or someone points it out – which they will do – he will have to get rid of the boys. He may already have done it.’

  That nightmare moment is still with me. We will never know the truth, because Henry and his helpers have constructed an alternative version, in which King Edward’s first marriage never happened. There was no secret that gave Elizabeth Woodville such power over the King, they say. Clarence and Warwick only rebelled in order to defend the country against Richard’s evil determination to rule. There is one mystery, though.

  Henry issued a long list of Richard’s ‘wrongs, odious offences and abominations against God and men and in special our said sovereign lord.’ (Henry himself.) And yet, the detailed list made no mention that Richard might have killed the princes, although suspicion was running wild about what had happened to them. Henry’s trump card would have been to say Richard was their murderer. But he did not do it. Much later, his supporters painted Richard as the killer of his nephews, but not at the time. Why was that? Was Henry aware of a different truth, and avoided any mention of the boys for fear of starting a troublesome enquiry? We will never know.

  The fate of Eliz
abeth Woodville is also strange. Despite her energetic efforts to support Henry Tudor, he confiscated all her lands and property and made them over to her daughter, whom he had married. Then he banished her to an abbey in Bermondsey for the rest of her life. What had Elizabeth done to cause such drastic retribution? The reason Henry gave seemed feeble for a man well used to shifts of allegiance for diplomatic purposes – it never worried him that Stanley veered from one side to the other as it suited him. All he could say against Elizabeth was that she and her daughters had lived for some months in Richard’s palace when they came out of sanctuary and were thus ‘contaminated’ by him.

  There is another possibility. Elizabeth must at some point have found out the terrible truth about her boys. Either she knew all along, and colluded in it for the sake of keeping in with the Tudors – which seems impossible for any mother – or someone whispered that Henry was responsible for their deaths.

  If that happened, it would have been typical of her to confront him in righteous fury. She would then have been as dangerous to Henry as poor Clarence had been to her, years earlier. He had to silence her, before she could spread her dangerous knowledge. Elizabeth would have gambled on the assumption that he could not kill her, for it would have raised too much of a scandal, but perhaps she never thought he might banish her from public life. Too late, she saw her danger and protested desperately that Richard had dragged her to his court by force – but Henry was in a class of his own when it came to inventive lying. Elizabeth vanished behind the closed walls of Bermondsey Abbey and spoke no further word to anyone in the outside world. Her death a few years later was hardly noticed.

  Others have been lavishly rewarded. Dr Alcock is Controller of the Royal Works and Buildings. Morton is the Archbishop of Canterbury and also the Lord Chancellor. People loathe him for the double-edged tax system known as ‘Morton’s Fork’, which holds that a man who lives frugally will be saving money, so he must pay as much tax as the wealthiest. Henry is paying several writers as well as Morton to produce approved versions of Richard’s life. One of them, Polydore Vergil, is Italian, and knows only what he is told.

  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 12th 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.

  Historical Note

  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 crowne
d. 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

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