To think Richard III clearly murdered the princes in the tower?

[Ppejfhfhrhhfhf]

It seems quite clear to me that Richard III betrayed his nephews, murdered them and usurped their crown.

Whenever I see discussions about it on social media or wherever, people always come on and try to claim he’s a misrepresented soul who’d never have done that. If you’re someone who believes him innocent, what do you think happened to the princes?

Would also be very interested if anyone knowledgeable knows what contemporary sources were saying at the time. What did the public think had happened to their King (Edward V)?

I don't think Richard had them killed.

In the first place he had no need to - he'd already declared them illegitimate so their deaths were unnecessary.

Plus, if he did have them killed he surely would have displayed their bodies publicly and said they died of an illness. Just like his brother did with Henry VI. You really dont want people believing theyre still alive - they would be a rallying point for insurrection.

Having them disappear was the worst situation for him. Look at Henry VII - his reign was always insecure due to pretenders claiming to be Edward V or Richard of York.

I think it was Margaret Beaufort in cahoots with Buckingham to clear the way for her son (Henry VII).

Whose DNA would you match it to? I understand that that far back, mitochondrial DNA is what you need to test (because you can be fairly certain who mothers are, but over many generations the paternal line is less reliable (affairs etc)). When they tested Richard III they could only find one person in his maternal line with fully female descent and IIRC it was a man, so they were very luck he was still alive because the mitochondrial line will end with him . The princes DNA down the maternal line would need female - female - female etc descendants of their sisters?
I suppose you might try to match to Richard III because there should be a close match there?

Contemporary sources believed Richard killed them.

'Contemporary sources' were believing all sorts of things about the Princess of Wales recently.

Buckingham is my prime suspect. My theory is he did the deed when Richard was out of London, thinking Richard would be pleased, but Richard very definitely wasn't pleased. Hence Buckingham's rebellion - at the very least he couldn't expect any more favour from Richard, and might well have lost his head.

But there isn't any hard evidence one way or the other.

(Any Jodi Taylor fans here?😉)

Wonderful book.
Very convincing.

Of course, because Edward IV was a bigamist and his children by Elizabeth Woodville were all illegitimate!

to any of their relatives, most of whom are lying around conveniently labelled - or to Richard III himself, DNA helpfully already recorded.

It is widely known and documented that Richard had had the children of Edward IV and Elizabeth removed from the line of succession due to the validity of the parents marriage. The decision was backed by the members of the court so he would have had no possible reason to then kill the boys.. If the court had not backed this decision then he may have killed them. This would be because the line of succession would have moved back up to him because George was killed for treason and that meant that his line had also been removed from the succession.

It would probably be really hard to prove his innocence though if the events had happened in this way.

who knows. My aunt worked for social services. She was asked to move from her parking space because Richard 111 was buried there.

This - whoever did it must have realised that any scheme which didn’t end with two visible corpses was going to leave the future open to an indefinite number of pretenders?

Quite

Here is a more interesting mystery - was Edward II murdered? Or did he escape to France? I'd love to see what DNA analysis of the bones in his supposed grave would reveal!

It would good if Charles would give scientists permission to carbon date and, if possible, DNA test the 1674 bones. This would be helpful, if not definitive.

If I had to gamble now, based on no primary evidence whatsoever, I'd probably stake that the boys were killed on behalf of Richard.

This doesn't mean that Richard directly ordered their deaths - it's plausible that someone else took the hint and did what they believed would benefit Richard.

I've always leaned towards it being the Tudors. The speed with which Henry repealed the law that made the York children illegitimate was a bit damning. If he though there was a chance his new bride's brothers would emerge from hiding and have a better claim to the throne then he never would have done that.

Plus he had announced his plan to marry Elizabeth of York before the Battle of Bosworth, and I think it was safe to assume that most of the suspicion would fall to Richard.

I don't think Henry necessarily did/organised it though, I think Jasper Tudor and Margaret Beaufort were the brains behind the operation to get him on the throne.

I don't know much about it to be honest but my mum was the person you need ask, she was in the Richard III society and was a bit crazy about him.

My mother in law is a direct descendant of Margaret Beaufort, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if her family had something to do with it.

Nice Blackadder reference, @Fangisnotacoward

If it was in Margaret Beaufort's gift, why did she agree to Henry marrying Edward IV's "illegitimate" daughter Elizabeth of York?

We may never know and it wasn't the first and won't be the last potential injustice.

Well if you google, plenty of media sources say that Charles is not opposed…

I've often wondered if the Tyrell confession was a way of tying up a loose end so that no one else could pretend to be the princes.

IIRC, the Tyrell confession emerged around the time Henry was negotiating the marriage of Prince Arthur and Catherine of Aragon.

Ferdinand and Isabella: 'How do we know the Tudors are here to stay? Those Princes will be all grown up now and just looking for an opportunity to come and reclaim the throne for the Yorkists. Why should we marry our daughter into some family of Welsh nobodies who could find themselves booted out at any moment?

Henry: 'Funny you should mention that. This just landed on my desk this morning...'

I thought I read some time ago that Charles has given permission for DNA matching (or did I dream it)

I don’t buy it. He was astute and having them disappear served him no purpose; in fact it was likely to mean a lifetime (if he’d lived) of various Pretenders either coming forward or being positioned for the Throne by his detractors. On a personal level, he has been shown to have had a pretty good relationship with his nieces and nephews in prior times and there’s nothing in his general behaviour to suggest he was capable of such a cold-blooded murder of children.

I don’t think it would have been that hard for others to get to the Princes; it was a time of such divided loyalties, one would just have had to pick the right guard!

Henry VII probably did it but he founded the Tudor line so they made sure that history was written to make it look like Richard did it.

The paternal line DNA test for Richard didn’t give a match to the apparent paternal line descendant (they suppose due to illegitimacy somewhere). I suppose given presumably the Y-chromosome DNA has been sequenced for Richard you could try to match it. But the chances of finding a fully female line back that far are slim (as evidenced by the fact they only found 1 for Richard III).

Any relations through a mixed male female line I don’t think ‘work’ for this sort of DNA testing? I am prepared to be corrected though, am not an expert.

More than a bit convenient for Richard that discovery, wasn't it?

There is no actual evidence that they were murdered at all, by Richard or anyone else. The popular belief that they were murdered by their uncle is based on rumour and hearsay, most of it written after the fact by people who weren’t around, or even alive, at the time, and once Henry VII had come to power and the Tudor propaganda machine had kicked in. We’ve seen very recently in our own time how rumour can quickly turn into scandal when it comes to the royal family.

Don’t get me wrong, they may very well have been murdered, and Richard may have done it, but in the absence of actual evidence it’s only right that when considering the question you should look at all of the possible outcomes and not accept one version of events as the undisputed truth.

Langley is very clearly biased, but I think her work has some merit in that it highlights what’s out there in the world in the way of an alternative narrative. Historians may have been aware of these documents before but the public at large weren’t. There are clear issues with the way the documentary presents them, mostly by ignoring entirely the fact that at least some of them may well have been propaganda pieces themselves to support a challenge to Tudor rule. But we don’t know either way. I’m currently reading her new book, as I find the whole topic fascinating, and I’ll be interested to see if the book considers that possibility.

If Charles ever gives permission to exhume the remains found in the tower, it should be possible to confirm whether or not they are the princes as John Ashdown-Hill, who traced Richard’s DNA, has managed to trace a maternal line of DNA for the princes. I haven’t read his book, but apparently he has examined the reports from the 1930s on the remains and thinks they may be Anglo-Saxon. They apparently also show a genetic dental condition which isn’t present in Richard’s remains which he says makes it less likely they are related. I think he’s a pretty big Ricardian, however, so once again, bias!

Daughter of Time is a brilliant read, highly recommend. I’d also recommend The Sunne in Splendour by Sharon K Penman, it’s fantastic. Highly Ricardian, but I’m fine with an antidote to the Shakespearean version 😁