Case of the Murderous Monarch
EDINBURGH — For over 400 years, Richard III has been seen as Britain’s most infamous king — a power-hungry usurper who killed his young nephews. In Shakespeare’s “Richard III,” the king tells an assassin, “I wish the bastards dead,” referring to the princes Edward V and Richard. “And I would have it suddenly performed.”
But the king’s murderous image, drawn from history books and cemented in lore, has not been proven true, says Philippa Langley, an author and independent historian.
A prominent member of the Richard III Society, an organization that has been working since 1924 “to secure a more balanced assessment of the king,” Ms. Langley has made a career of researching — and rehabilitating — a man who ruled from 1483 to his death in 1485.
In 2012, she spearheaded a project to find his remains, which were under a parking lot in Leicester, as she believed they would be, and give him a dignified burial. But after the burial, she found she could not quite let him go — he was still seen as a murderer. So she took on the case of the princes’ disappearance. Is there, she wanted to know, enough archival evidence to say beyond a reasonable doubt that Richard III ordered the assassinations?
In “The Princes in the Tower,” published in late 2023, she uses what she calls “the same principles and practices as a modern police inquiry.” “It’s about making sure that the story we tell about this country is correct,” Ms. Langley, 62, said.
Some of her detractors say she does not have the right credentials (she did not attend university). Some critics see her as blinded by her own rosy image of the king. But she has earned the respect of many university scholars. For finding Richard III’s body, she was awarded an M.B.E., a national honor. She was even played by Sally Hawkins in the 2022 film “The Lost King.”
Richard III’s brother, King Edward IV, died in the spring of 1483. Richard was made protector of the realm until the king’s eldest son and successor, the 12-year-old Edward V, came of age. But before the boy was crowned, his parents’ marriage was declared illegitimate and his coronation was suspended.
Richard III was proclaimed king instead. Soon after, the boy and his younger brother, Richard, 9, disappeared from the Tower of London.
That, Ms. Langley argues, makes it a missing persons inquest, not a murder case. “This was all we knew for certain, based on the available evidence,” she writes.
She says that the dominant narrative — that Richard III had the princes killed to take the throne — is a rumor that calcified into fact over 500 years. Instead, she suggests, the boys were alive when he was crowned. Richard III was the last king in England’s Plantagenet line. Henry VII, who ousted him, was the first Tudor king; he had a dynasty to establish, a reputation to build. So, Ms. Langley argues, Henry VII cast his predecessor as a villain.
It would also have been useful for the Tudors if people thought the boys were dead, unable to fight for the throne, Ms. Langley writes in the book. Rumors of their deaths started under Henry VII, she notes, pointing to texts from Richard III’s reign that talk about his nephews in the present tense.
That is why she thinks the boys were not killed, at least not in the Tower of London in 1483. Instead, she argues, they were smuggled out of London. Then, after Richard III was killed and the princes were made legitimate again, she says they both tried to retake the throne.
She weaves her argument out of archival material gathered over seven years by more than 300 independent researchers. The evidence includes receipts for weapons; a witness statement describing the boys’ flight; royal seals and more.
Ms. Langley also tries to debunk some of the historically accepted evidence in support of the view that the nephews were assassinated, the so-called eyewitness testimonies.
Many top academics agree that these accounts are thin. “People realize how flimsy the evidence is,” said Philip Schwyzer, a specialist in early modern English literature at the University of Exeter.
But for Ms. Langley’s argument to prevail, she must explain the skeletons of young children that were found in the tower in 1674. The bones were examined in 1933 and are interred at Westminster Abbey as the remains of the princes.
“How many children would have been put in a box and buried under a staircase in the tower?” said Raluca Radulescu, a professor of medieval literature at the University of Bangor, in Wales.
Ms. Langley has an answer: The remains have not undergone modern scientific analysis or DNA testing. That would require approval by the Dean of Westminster.
“The view of previous deans has always been that the mortal remains of two young children, widely believed since the 17th century to be the princes in the tower, should not be disturbed,” said Victoria Ribbans, a spokeswoman for the Abbey. “There are no current plans to change this.”
Did Richard III kill his young nephews so he could be king?