A royal secret may lie buried in the Devon stones
Was Edward V murdered by Richard III, or did he live under an alias in the country? Eleanor Steafel reports
If ever you find yourself in rural Devon, somewhere roughly at the midpoint between where Exmoor ends and Dartmoor begins, cleave a path to Coldridge, a tiny village at the very top of a boggy hill. There is no quaint country store, no off-thebeaten-track Michelin-star pub or local art gallery; just a few thatched cottages and bungalows.
Why go out of your way to make the journey here? For the chance to step inside the village’s pearl of a 15thcentury church, the spire of which you can just see peeking out of the mist as you make your way up on a grey winter’s morning. You might want to go soon, for Coldridge has just been revealed to be the site of a historical mystery to rival the he sort found in a Dan Brown novel, and d it could see this small Devon von enclave become a hotspot t for history buffs.
If you didn’t catch tch the remarkable story ory of the Princes in the he Tower last week, let et me bring you up to o speed. More than five centuries ago, two young princes were supposedly murdered by their uncle, Richard III; he declared them illegitimate, murdered them and took the throne. Now, it seems he may have been innocent. Researchers led by Phillippa Langley, whose team discovered the remains of the last of the Plantagenet kings under a Leicester car park, claim to have uncovered evidence that one of the boys (Edward, the elder) may not have been killed. Rather, he may have been allowed to live under an alias on land owned by his half-brother in a remote part of Devon as part of a deal struck between his mother and the King and, later, with Henry Tudor. It’s a story that people in Coldridge have told themselves for some time. But thanks to clues that have been pored over for the past five years by one dedicated villager villag and a team of experts around arou the world, the tale may have ha merit after all. A man called calle John Evans, who managed manag the deer park behind the church and whose tomb lies inside it, may in fact have been the lost boy who, for two tw and a half months m in 1483, was w King Edward V of England. It would be easy e to assume that th the person behind b this extraordinary ex discovery dis might be a sort of Indiana Jones type with a hat and an archaeologist’s brush, or a Harvard professor of the likes of Robert Langdon in The Da Vinci Code. In fact it is John Dike, a grandfather and retired electrical engineer who has lived in Coldridge for 22 years, has a passion for history and a keen eye for a clue. He was writing a book about the history of the village five years ago when he began to wonder seriously about some of the unusual features in the church.
“It became obvious that there were things which shouldn’t have been there,” explains Dike, showing me around on a dismal December day.
He began researching and was soon contacted by Langley, who had formed the Missing Princes Project. “There’s somebody in Texas, there are two or three in Devon, someone in
Gloucestershire,” says Dike, who, at 79, seems to have become the project’s man on the ground in Coldridge, where locals are tickled by the idea it could put their village on the map.
He takes me through the team’s discoveries, at pains to stress that this has been a joint effort. On one window in the chantry, which was built by John Evans in 1511, is a picture of Edward V himself, the missing prince. Below him, a man with a disfigured face gazes up at him. Above his head floats a large crown with what is believed to be the Yorkist symbol of the Falcon and Fetterlock in its centre, and an ermine lining dotted with pictures of 41 tiny deer. “This was made in 1511 – take 41 off that, and it takes you back to 1470, which is the birth of Edward V. Another little message.”
There are only two other glass portraits of Edward – one in Worcestershire, the other in Canterbury Cathedral. Dike discovered that, more than 100 years ago, a Devon historian called Beatrix Cresswell noted the unlikely presence of the stained glass depiction. “[She] said this is a place that’s isolated and it’s very small, how does it justify a church this size? And it’s a most unusual place to find one of the only portraits of Edward V. That made me think.”
He started digging, poring over the patent rolls of Richard III and spending hours looking in every crevice of the church, realising there were Rose of York motifs on the floor tiles, Yorkist emblems on the wooden roof and tiny carvings of a Tudor woman with a long tongue – possibly a reference to Henry Tudor’s mother Margaret Beaufort, says Dike, who lives just down the hill with his wife Jo. One of the most exciting discoveries, he says, came while examining the rolls. “In 1484, on March 1, the mother of the princes and her daughters were in sanctuary in Westminster Abbey, hiding from Richard III in fear of their lives.
“Richard said: ‘I will find husbands for your daughters, you have nothing to worry about, come back to court’ – and within two days of that, I find that he sent someone called Robert Markenfield here.”
Markenfield was sent on an unknown mission from Yorkshire. Some time afterwards, a man called John Evans arrived and was granted the titles Lord of the Manor and ‘Parker’ of the deer park behind the church. No record has yet been found of Evans’s life before he arrived in Devon: “That was a little bit of a lightbulb moment.”
A story told of Edward is that he may have been the king who was crowned in Dublin two years after Richard III’s death and fought in the Battle of Stoke. “Led from the field was this person that history called Lambert Simnel,” says Dike, “but if you go back to the original chronicles, it said the real name of this boy was John. He could have been Edward V. He could have been reverting to using John Evans.”
There’s a possibility, Dike says, that he was wounded. “There’s also a possibility, which is horrible, that the wounding may have happened after the battle, to disfigure him. If you cut across the chin it cuts the muscle which controls the lips, the lips drop and your mouth is exposed.” Sure enough, the man in the stained glass who Dike and his fellow researchers believe to be John Evans has an exposed mouth.
“That was a moment,” says Dike, with just the faintest glimmer of pride. “I know Phillippa Langley was quite amazed by that.”
There are further clues on the tomb itself: Evans is incorrectly spelt as ‘EVAS’. “The thought might be that EV stands for Edward V – it’s just a possibility.” He thinks AS could be an abbreviation of ‘ASA’, “which in Latin is ‘in sanctuary’”. Underneath is inscribed the word ‘KING’ and nine short etched lines, “which could be 1509, when Henry VII died and, all things being equal, Edward V could have taken over.”
What, then, is the next step, I ask, imagining a great excavation project to find the bones of Edward V. Dike looks horrified. “Absolutely not,” he says; the remains “could be anywhere”.
His next step is to learn more about the mysterious John Evans. “You just keep digging and occasionally something comes up, and then it might go completely dead and you’ve got nothing,” he says. “Then pop – something else comes up.”