Richard III and the bricklayer

The princes in the Tower feature (September) does not mention at least two other theories on the boys’ fate. It is highly likely that their murder was organised by Margaret Beaufort, Henry Tudor’s mother. She had the motive, the opportunity and the means to do it, and would have done absolutely anything to help her son onto the throne. She was in London, she knew people at the Tower, and she could have simply hired a couple of assassins.

Another possibility is that the young Edward V died of natural causes. It is a fact that he was being treated daily in the Tower by a doctor, John Argentine, for an unspecified illness. After Edward died, it is suggested that his brother, Richard, the young Duke of York, was taken away and brought up in a safe house in the country – and that, after the battle of Bosworth, Richard’s henchman Lord Lovell took him to Colchester Abbey where he was enrolled as a lay monk and taught to be a bricklayer. Henry VII visited Colchester on his progresses more times than any other town of its size – presumably to check the young man wasn’t becoming the focus of a Yorkist plot.

After the monasteries’ dissolution, the theory goes, Richard turned up at Eastwell in Kent where he helped a local lord build a house. He revealed his identity to his master but begged him not to tell anyone until after his death. He died in 1550 and the tomb of Richard Plantagenet still stands in Eastwell churchyard.

This theory must, I believe, carry some considerable weight. It comes from the late David Baldwin – the very historian who, as long ago as 1986, predicted that we would find the remains of Richard III under a Leicester car park. Tony Boullemier, Northampton