Eugene Finerman, my friend and fellow-blogger, reminds us that today is the anniversary of the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, where King Richard III was killed by his rival for the English crown, Henry Tudor, thereafter Henry VII.

Most people, if they know anything about Richard III, know him as the malevolent hunchback that Shakespeare depicted in his historical tragedy of the same name. But for years, Richard has had a small, devoted and vocal band of supporters who insist that the poor man was cruelly libeled. In particular, they insist that he never committed the crime for which he is most notorious, the murder of his nephews -- the little princes in the Tower.

Eugene gives a typically magisterial summary of the case on Richard's behalf. It may be viewed at http://finermanworks.com/your_rda_of_irony/2007/08/22/the-karl-roves-of-tudor-england/You

For my reply, see below. For dedicated history buffs like the two of us, the Wars of the Roses never really ended.

Eugene –-

Your latest post reminds me of a young man who was once seen picketing a performance of Shakespeare’s Richard III. He carried a sign that read, “SHAKESPEARE WAS A TUDOR FINK!”

No doubt he was. But that doesn’t clear Richard III of the charge that he murdered his nephews.

Richard’s apologists likewise discount Sir Thomas More’s biography of Richard as “Tudor propaganda” –- despite the fact that More never finished it, and it was never published in his lifetime. Moreover, although More’s account admittedly contains some inaccuracies, More was both a brilliant lawyer and scholar and was later canonized by the Catholic church. So his assessment of Richard cannot be dismissed out of hand.

You say that Richard had no need to dispose of his nephews because Parliament had already declared them illegitimate. That was a mere technicality, as Henry VIII demonstrated by the ease with which he legitimatized and de-legitimized his own offspring. While the princes in the Tower remained alive, they were a focus for opposition to Richard, and he knew it.

What is indisputable is that the princes were confined to the Tower by Richard in 1483 and they were never seen alive again. Could the Duke of Buckingham have killed the princes on his own initiative as you suggest? It’s possible, but it’s unlikely that anyone but Richard himself would have dared to take such a step. Yes, it was a brutal age, but murdering innocent children shocked people’s sensibilities, even then. The Feast of the Holy Innocents (commemorating the innocent children slain by King Herod in an effort to kill the baby Jesus) was a popular devotion in medieval England.

That the princes were dead when Henry Tudor landed in England in 1485 to claim the crown may be safely assumed. Had they been alive, all Richard had to do was to produce them in public, because either of them (“illegitimate” or not) had a better claim to the throne than did Henry. Henry’s campaign would have collapsed like a pricked balloon.

You point out that when Henry Tudor ascended the throne as Henry VII, he had Parliament issue a list of Richard’s crimes, and that this list does not specifically mention the murder of the princes. That is true, although it does charge Richard with “the shedding of innocents’ blood” –- which was perhaps an oblique reference to the boys in the Tower.

Why didn’t Henry VII trumpet the murder of the princes as one of Richard’s blackest crimes? Well, as it happened, there was another young innocent in the Tower at the time: 10-year-old Edward, Earl of Warwick. Edward was also Richard’s nephew, the son of his older brother, the Duke of Clarence, who was famously drowned in the butt of malmsey. Richard III had named Edward as his heir after the death of his son in 1484. So Henry VII had good reason not to create public sympathy for poor little princes unjustly imprisoned in the Tower. Edward was reported to be too simple-minded to plot against Henry, but Henry had him beheaded in 1499 after Perkin Warbeck’s uprising, just to make sure.

Then there’s the question as to why the Queen Mother (Queen Elizabeth, widow of Edward IV and mother of the murdered princes), should have been imprisoned in 1487 for being a supporter of Richard III. Remember that Queen Elizabeth had a daughter, also named Elizabeth. When Richard’s wife, Anne Neville, was dying, rumors circulated that Richard wanted to marry the younger Elizabeth in order to strengthen his claim to the throne. Some sources say that Queen Elizabeth was behind these rumors, notwithstanding that her daughter was Richard’s niece and the marriage would have been incestuous.

Richard’s apologists have claimed that Queen Elizabeth’s purported connivance at this bizarre union “proves” that Richard was innocent of the murder of his nephews, because Queen Elizabeth would never have let the murderer of her sons marry her daughter. Unfortunately for that argument, Queen Elizabeth’s connivance can also taken as proof that the boys were dead. If the boys were alive, she would have had no interest in strengthening Richard’s grip on the throne. But if they were dead, then her only hope of holding on to even a scrap of power was by making her daughter queen. Eventually, she did just that by marrying the girl to Henry VII after he killed Richard at the Battle of Bosworth.

Queen Elizabeth was probably imprisoned because she was a nasty mother-in-law and an incorrigible plotter to boot. The fact that she was widely believed to have dabbled in witchcraft suggests that she was very unpleasant to have around.

For a useful antidote to pro-Richard propaganda, see Richard III: England’s Black Legend by Desmond Seward.

Cordially,

Hal