by Renee Duke
She slipped the medallion back over Dane’s head.
“We’ll take good care of it,” he promised, tucking it into his shirt again. “And be more careful about how we use it than…well, than we have been.”
“I know you will,” said Grantie Etta. “But you seem to have sorted out what went wrong.”
“We still don’t know if we actually helped the princes,” said Dane, “and we won’t, unless we can find something.”
“Something you think might be in here?” said Grantie Etta. They nodded. “You’d better keep looking then. It’s always best to see things through to the end.”
It was Dane who found it. Standing on a chair beside the stone eagle, he spotted something jammed into a crack under one of its wings. A small package wrapped in grey velvet.
Calling to the others, he took it out and jumped down with it in his hand. He placed it on top of the washstand beside Grantie Etta so that everyone could see it. Looking down, he fingered the little bundle uncertainly. It might be the message they’d been seeking and it might not. But if it wasn’t…
A glance at Paige and Jack told him they were as nervous as he was. Even Grantie Etta was leaning forward anxiously.
“Open it,” Paige urged.
The package contained the princes’ Keeper Ring and a piece of parchment. Smoothing out the parchment, Dane gazed down at the message written upon it.
It said, nil desperandum, which Jack was able to translate into: ‘There is no reason for despair’.
The End
Historical Background
Did The Princes Really Just Disappear?
Most scholars believe the princes were murdered. Whether this was on the orders of their uncle, Richard the Third, another uncle, Henry, Duke of Buckingham, their future brother-in-law, Henry the Seventh, or his mother, Margaret Beaufort, is still up for debate. But if they were murdered, where were they buried?
The Tower of London has been standing for almost a thousand years, and people of all ages met their ends there. A wooden box unearthed from the White Tower in the seventeenth century did contain two small skeletons that people of the time thought might belong to the missing princes, but these were not the only children’s bones ever found within its walls and could have come from any era that preceded the one in which they were uncovered. Now at rest in Westminster Abbey, they were officially declared to be the remains of Edward the Fifth and Richard, Duke of York, but forensic tests carried out in 1933 failed to prove it, and no further tests have ever been conducted. The recently discovered bones of the princes’ uncle, Richard the Third, were identified through the DNA of a Canadian descendent of the Plantagenet family, but no DNA tests are planned for the Westminster bones. Without such tests, there is no way to know if they really are the bones of Edward and his brother.
Should the Westminster bones not be the princes’ bones, it is possible they were not murdered and lived to grow up. Chroniclers of the time reported seeing Edward the Fourth’s sons playing in the Tower gardens up until the autumn of 1483. No later sightings were recorded, but some possible references have been found. A number of royal children lived at Richard the Third’s northern castle of Sheriff Hutton. Some were named, but others were not. The princes could have been among them. Their mother, Elizabeth Woodville, did not, at any time, accuse anyone of murdering them. Papers of the Tyrell family indicate that when she came out of Westminster Sanctuary in 1484, she went to live at Gipping Hall in Suffolk and state that she lived there with all her children.
Then there were the imposters. During the reign of Henry the Seventh, several boys came forward claiming to be a Yorkist prince. Most were quickly exposed as frauds, but one pseudo Duke of York played his role so well that the rulers of Spain, Burgundy, and Scotland all supported his bid for the throne. He first appeared in 1491 and was not captured until 1497. Before his execution in 1499, he confessed to being Perkin Warbeck, the son of a Flemish merchant, but since this confession was obtained through torture, it could have been a false one. Some people think Perkin Warbeck really was the missing Duke of York.
There is also something else to consider. If the princes did survive, they might, as this book suggests, have chosen to live quietly and make no claim on the throne. In 1550, a story began to be told about an old bricklayer who had just died in Eastwell, Kent. A bricklayer who liked to read after his day’s work. This was a most unusual pastime for a bricklayer, and this bricklayer could read in Latin. Upon being questioned, he admitted to a connection with the royal family—a connection he said he was advised to hide after the Battle of Bosworth. Edward the Fifth would have been eighty years old in December 1550, and Richard, Duke of York seventy-seven. This old man was believed to have been of similar age and was buried under the name Richard Plantagenet.
These are, however, just possibilities. There is no real evidence to confirm any of the theories that have been put forward over the years. What happened to the princes is still a mystery.
Books by Renee Duke from Books We Love
The Time Rose Series
Book 1: The Disappearing Rose
Book 2: The Mud Rose
Book 3: The Spirit Rose
Book 4: The Tangled Rose
The Side Trip Series
Book 1: Ring Of Beom
Renee Duke grew up in Ontario/B.C., Canada and Berkshire, England. Due to a treacherous re-drawing of county lines while she was out of the country, her little English market town is now in Oxfordshire, but she’s still a Berkshire girl at heart.
After qualifying as an Early Childhood Educator, she went on to work with children of all ages in a number of capacities, including a stint in Belize, Central America with World Peace and Development. These days she still does occasional interactive history units with 6-to-12-year-olds but is otherwise retired from teaching.
Mother of one son, she resides in Kelowna B.C..
Find Renee on Facebook @
https://www.facebook.com/renee.duke.author
https://www.facebook.com/renee.duke.75
Website: www.reneeduke.ca
Blog: https://reneeduke.wordpress.com/
(Time Travelling With Kids)
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