DID EDWARD V SURVIVE?
An obscure village church in Devon may hold clues to the fate of the Princes in the Tower
Richard III, the last Yorkist king, was accused by Thomas More of ordering the death of his nephews, 12-year-old Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury, nine, in the Tower of London in August 1483 – an accusation immortalised by Shakespeare. There have always been sceptics. For instance, in 1768 Horace Walpole published a book entitled Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third. Edward’s reign lasted from the death of his father Edward IV in April 1483 until 26 June, when his uncle Richard declared the marriage of his parents invalid. A pair of skeletons found in the Tower in 1674 were said to be those of the missing princes and interred in Westminster Abbey, but their identity was not proven. These bones were reexamined in 1933, at which time it was discovered the skeletons were incomplete and had been interred with animal bones. Permission for a subsequent examination has been refused. In 1789, workmen carrying out repairs in St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, rediscovered and accidentally broke into the vault of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville (the parents of the missing princes). Adjoining this was another vault, which was found to contain the coffins of two children. This tomb was inscribed with the names of two of Edward IV’s children who had predeceased him: George, Duke of Bedford, and Mary. However, the remains of these two children were later found elsewhere in the chapel, leaving the occupants of the children’s coffins within the tomb unknown.
Now the Missing Princes Project, including researchers John Dike and Philippa Langley, has highlighted evidence that Edward V survived and lived under a pseudonym in an obscure Devon village. (Langley, long a devotee of Richard III, helped find his bones under a Leicester car park in 2012; see FT299:4-5). The researchers suspect Edward was ‘John Evans’, Lord of the Manor in Coldridge, Devon, who in 1511 built a chantry at the village church, St Matthew’s. The church has carvings of symbols from Edward’s Royal House of York and an effigy of Evans gazing at a stained glass window depicting Edward V. The researchers maintain that the two youths are one and the same: the effigies of both look similar. The window depicts Edward beneath a giant crown, lined with ermine bearing pictures of 41 tiny deer. At the date the window was installed, Edward would have been 41 years old, and ‘John Evans’ was ‘parker’ (steward) of the deer park behind the church, which held 130 deer. The window also contains a small depiction said to be Evans himself, wearing an ermine jacket and carrying a crown, both of which were reserved quite specifically for royalty. This image and the effigy on the tomb of Evans both have a scar on the chin.
On the tomb (which lies empty), Evans’s name is misspelled “EVAS”. It is suggested EV stands for Edward V, while AS refers to “asa”, Latin for “in sanctuary”. Just beneath it, someone has carved the word ‘king’ (though it appears upside down compared to the name on the tomb) – which speaks for itself as a clue. Actually, this theory isn’t new: in 1920 local historian Beatrix Cresswell surveyed the churches of Devon and noted how unusual it was for the tomb of John Evans to be so steeped in Yorkist imagery.
It is certainly strange to find a stained glass image of Edward V in a rural church in Devon. There are only two other depictions of Edward in stained glass: one in Canterbury Cathedral and another in Little Malvern Priory (a former Benedictine abbey).
In March 1484, Elizabeth Woodville, mother of the two princes, left Westminster with her daughters after reaching a deal with Richard III. She then wrote to her exiled rebel son, Thomas Grey, Marquis of Dorset (1455-1501), telling him to come home from Brittany as Richard agreed to pardon him. On 3 March, documents show that Richard sent a follower on a mission from Yorkshire to Coldridge, which sat within Grey’s seized lands. Soon after this event, ‘John Evans’ suddenly appeared in the village, and was given the title Lord of the Manor. No record of his life before this has been found. In 1483, Henry VII – who defeated Richard III at Bosworh Field in 1485 and founded the Tudor dynasty – married Elizabeth (1466-1503), elder sister of the missing princes. But what about Edward’s younger brother Richard? Was he too concealed under another name? thehistoricalnovel.com, dailymail.co.uk, 29 Dec; D.Mirror, D.Express, 30 Dec 2021.