Saint Thomas More and the Princes in the Tower: New Evidence?

Last December, Channel 5 in the UK broadcast a documentary on the mystery of the fate of the Princes in the Tower--one of whom was the uncrowned King Edward V--titled Princes in the Tower: A Damning Discovery. 

The BBC History Magazine's December 2024 issue, which I perused in a local chain book/game/gift/toy store, featured an interview with two historians about that "damning discovery". Whom does that discovery damn? Hint: Not Saint Thomas More.

The evidence is that King Edward V's gold chain was handed down by a wealthy London woman in her will -- and that woman was the sister-in-law of Sir James Tyrell, the man Thomas More identified as the organizer of the murder of the Princes in the Tower at King Richard III's command.

Tim Thornton, Professor of History at the University of Huddersfield, found the will and shared his discovery with Jason Watkins and Tracy Borman, an historian and chief curator of Historic Royal Palaces during the documentary. From the BBC History article, Thornton explains his methodology:

One of the key sources we have on the disappearance is a detailed account written around 30 years later by Thomas More. He will be a familiar name to people interested in the Tudor era, and his account is the first that identifies how the deed was done and who was to blame. More claims that two individuals – Miles Forest and John Dighton – carried out the murder for an agent of Richard III called Sir James Tyrrell.

When I began looking at More’s account, I was working against a background of very great scepticism about his story. Many people believed it was a simple exercise in propaganda on behalf of the Tudors – Richard’s enemies who were on the throne at the time. Other people have suggested that More was more interested in literary flair and political philosophy than historical accuracy; he was writing an abstract account of how a country can fall into tyranny.

First, Thornton found a letter from More written while he was on embassy in Bruges and Miles Forest, son of the Miles Forest named above was a messenger, carrying More's letters back to England. Then he found the will of Lady Margaret Capell, widow of Sir William Capell or Capel, bequeathing a chain which had been King Edward V's, which her husband had left to her. (Margaret was a daughter of Sir John Arundell VII of Cornwall by his second wife, Katherine Chideocke or Chiddiock.)

Thornton adds another twist to the story:

It’s also worth noting that the Capells’ lawyer in the 1510s was a man called John More – the father of (you guessed it) Thomas More. So not only have we identified a physical object from the princes that survived in the hands of the sister-in-law of the man that More says organised the murders, but we’ve also established another connection with More himself.

I'd note that we don't have the chain nor do we have any record of the chain to test its provenance; there's some evidence on paper, but nothing concrete. Nevertheless, Tracey Borman expressed careful enthusiasm about the discovery:

As someone who has followed the story of the princes so closely throughout my whole career, I would say that this is undoubtedly the most significant discovery, not just in recent years, but in my entire tenure as a historian. I haven’t heard anything more compelling in this case than Tim’s latest discovery. This is the next chapter and it’s a hugely significant one.

She admits the discovery may strengthen the case against King Richard III, suggesting more evidence that he ordered the princes murdered. 

There's also a BBC News story summarizing the discovery. Other pictures are available at the University of Huddersfield website. And there's an article  (with open access now), "Sir William Capell and A Royal Chain: The Afterlives (and Death) of King Edward V" in History: The Journal of the Historical Association.

A further note: Lady Margaret Capell's will has been described before in a book by Susan E. James, Women's Voices in Tudor Wills, 1485–1603: Authority, Influence and Material (Ashgate, 2015):

The bequest was intended to entail the chain, the Capel bed with anchor badges, and other items to her grandchildren and the Capel family

"his faders cheyne which was younge kyng Edwarde the Vth's. To have the forsaid stuffe and cheyne during his life with reasonable werying upon that condicion that after his decease I will that yt remain and be kept by myn executors to the use of Henry Capell and Edward Capell from one to another, And for default of these two children, I will that my daughter Elizabeth Paulet shal'have the forsaid goodes".

I guess the next link in the mystery would be to find the chain!

Image Credit (Public Domain): The Two Princes Edward and Richard in the Tower, 1483 by Sir John Everett Millais, 1878, part of the Royal Holloway picture collection. Edward V at right wears the garter of the Order of the Garter beneath his left knee.

Saint Thomas More and the Princes in the Tower

My local PBS station is airing episodes of Lucy Worsley Investigates and I watched the first installment on the Princes in the Tower Sunday night. The Princes in the Tower are of course King Edward V of England and Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, the sons of King Edward IV.

Saint Thomas More's History of King Richard III was rather important to her investigation of the mystery: did Richard III order their murder? did Thomas More have good reason to name the murderers? or did Henry VII murder the princes after he defeated Richard III on Bosworth Field? were the two Pretenders (Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck) really the Princes?

Partisans for and against Richard III offer their opinions and Worsley tries to find documentation and evidence about the mystery.

I don't want to give away her conclusions, except to say that she does not agree entirely with Josephine Tey!

But Travis Curtright provides us with free resources, should you want to read a student edition of More's Richard III and a study guide.

One of the vignettes of this episode included her visit to Buckfast Abbey to view the hair shirt of Saint Thomas More, displayed there for public veneration since 2016. She questioned the authenticity of this relic, and Abbot David Charleswell, who had escorted her to the side altar, provided some explanation, but this blog gives much more detail:

In the century after More’s death a few competing stories sprang up about the hair shirt, and these are what I’m trying to unpick at the moment. One tradition has it that More sent the hair shirt to his daughter, the extraordinarily learned Margaret More Roper (1505–1544), who gave it to her equally learned sister by adoption, Margaret Giggs Clement (1508–1570), who later went into exile with her family to practice her faith, reportedly taking the hair shirt and other More relic-objects with her. Other traditions hold that Thomas More sent it to Giggs rather than Roper, who kept it until her death. Still other traditions state that he sent it to Giggs, who gave it to Roper, who returned it to Giggs, while another source claims that he sent it to his wife Alice. In any case, the hair shirt ultimately passed to Giggs Clements’ youngest daughter, Prioress Margaret Clement (1539–1612), a nun of the English convent of St Monica’s, founded in Louvain during the period when it was illegal to practice Catholicism in England. The nuns of St Monica’s claim to be More’s spiritual heirs through Margaret Giggs and her daughter Margaret Clement.

The hair shirt remained in Prioress Clement’s community and the communities descended from St Monica’s up until the 1980s, by which time most of the exiled English convents had returned to England. When I first began my doctoral studies in 2010 the exact whereabouts of the hair shirt were not clear. I recently discovered that when the modern-day St Monica’s convent closed, the hair shirt went to the Diocese of Plymouth for safe keeping. In 2011 it was transferred to Buckfast at the request of Abbot David Charleswell who arranged for it to be put on public permanent display at Buckfast starting in 2016.

So this first episode of Lucy Worsley Investigates provides almost as much information about St. Thomas More as it does about Richard III and the Princes in the Tower! It's interesting, also, that she finds more evidence about St. Thomas More than she does about the mystery she investigates.

Saint Thomas More, pray for us!

Picture credit (Public Domain): The Two Princes Edward and Richard in the Tower, 1483 by Sir John Everett Millais, 1878, part of the Royal Holloway picture collection. Edward V at right wears the garter of the Order of the Garter beneath his left knee.

My Review of Alison Weir's "Elizabeth of York"

I read this book on my Kindle, inspired by Elena Maria Vidal's review on her Tea at Trianon blog.

Elizabeth of York was like a hinge between the Plantagenets and the Tudors. Henry VII married her to strengthen his claim to the throne of England by conquest and yet he delayed both their wedding and her coronation in the attempt to assert it was his claim on the throne that mattered, not hers. (But it was really hers that mattered.)

Haunting both Elizabeth's "reign" as Queen and Henry's rule as King were her little brothers, Edward V and Richard, the Duke of York. Richard III had bastardized all of Edward IV's children, including Elizabeth, in Parliament--claiming that Edward had a pre-existing marital contract--and had held Edward and Richard in the Tower of London. They were reportedly killed there by orders of Richard III, yet their remains had never been found. Henry VII tried to find them; Elizabeth, as Weir notes, must have always wondered what happened to her brothers, who came before, as males, in the line of succession.

Weir introduces various other mysteries along the way through this biography: would Elizabeth really have wanted to marry Richard III? did Henry VII dislike Elizabeth's mother, Elizabeth Woodville? did Elizabeth and Margaret Beaufort, Henry's mother, get along or not? why did Queen Elizabeth of York go to Wales while pregnant and ill?, etc. She presents various pieces of evidence, analyzes their sources, presents her opinion, but ultimately leaves it to the reader to decide unless she is certain of the answer. At first--and she followed that process in another of her books I've read, The Lady in the Tower, about the fall of Anne Boleyn--this process frustrated me because it seemed to interrupt the flow of the narrative. But I have grown to accept and appreciate her letting me in on the process of thinking about the past, disputed information, and sources.

I recommend Elizabeth of York: The First Tudor Queen to those who want to know more about the world of the Tudors as well as those who want to know more about Elizabeth. Alison Weir describes the structures and finances of the Tudor Court with vivid detail. Well illustrated. No index in the Kindle edition; I don't like not having an index!

Thomas More's Birthday in Context

Today is St. Thomas More's birthday, on February 7, 1478. It's interesting to note that in 1478, on the 26th of May, Giulio di Giuliano de' Medici was born, who would be elected pope in 1523 and take the name Clement VII.

Thus, in the same year, two men who would be most involved in and affected by Henry VIII's Great Matter of ending his marriage to Queen Katherine of Aragon were born. Pope would refuse to grant Henry VIII the decree of nullity he sought; Thomas More stayed out of most of Henry VIII's marital arrangements and resigned as Chancellor when Henry VIII took his final action to proclaim himself Supreme Head and Governor of the Church of England in 1533. Pope Clement VII died in 1534, while Thomas More languished in the Tower of London, preparing for death because he would not take the Oaths of Supremacy and Succession demanded by Henry VIII.

When Thomas More was born, King Edward IV was on the throne, and on February 18, in 1478 George Plantagenet, the Duke of Clarence was executed for treason against the king--drowned in a butt of malmsey wine. George was Edward's brother, and as a member of the House of York, had switched sides to support the Lancastrians against his Edward. His surviving children were Edward, the Earl of Warwick and Margaret Plantagenet, who were made wards by Edward IV, and held under arrest by Richard III, who removed them from the succession because of the father's treason, attainder, and execution. The Earl of Warwick was held in the Tower of London by Henry VII after he same to the throne and later executed after the Perkin Warbeck pretender was unmasked. Henry arranged Margaret's marriage to Sir Richard Pole. Margaret's family, because of their claim to the throne and opposition to Henry VIII's supremacy over the Church in England. Her son, Reginald Pole, out of the reach of Henry VIII's attainder, would return to England during Mary I's reign as the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury.

Also in the year 1478, Edward IV arranged the marriage of his youngest son, Richard of Shrewsbury, when the little boy was only 4 years old. Richard was married to Anne de Mowbray of Norfold on January 15. Of course the marriage was never consummated because Anne, who was six when she married, died when she was eight. Young Richard is one of the two Princes in the Tower, along with his brother Edward V, who succeeded his father briefly before Richard III usurped the throne. More wrote about the reign of Richard III.

Two births, one execution, and one marriage, all in 1478. Those events were all background to momentous events yet to come: a new ruling dynasty in England, a new Church of England, and two martyrdoms.

But on this day in 1478, and father and mother, John and Agnes More, welcomed their new baby boy to the world, and started planning his baptism.

The English Reformation and the Wars of the Roses

Leanda de Lisle, author of After Elizabeth, The Sisters Who Would Be Queen, and Tudor: Passion. Manipulation. Murder. The Story of England's Most Notorious Royal Family, visited this blog when I posted a link to her article on Anne Boleyn's execution with a sword and included a link to her article about Margaret Beaufort and her depiction in The White Queen, a BBC mini-series based on the Philippa Gregory book. The article reflects on how later generations, looking back on history through the lens of the English Reformation and the ongoing mistrust of Catholics in English Society, regarded Henry VII's mother with great suspicion, even shifting the blame for the murder of the Princes in the Tower from Richard III to Margaret Beaufort:

Richard showed no more inclination than Edward IV to allow Henry Tudor home but when the princes vanished that summer and rumours emerged that Richard had ordered their deaths Margaret saw an opportunity. She suggested to the mother of the princes - the "White Queen", Elizabeth Woodville - that she agree to marry her eldest daughter to Henry Tudor. Edwardian loyalists could then combine with remaining Lancastrians to overthrow Richard and make Henry king.

Less than two years later Richard III was killed in battle at Bosworth and Henry Tudor was crowned. Margaret - the Red Queen - would gain huge political influence and become one of the richest women in England. Clearly she had benefited from the disappearance of the princes but it would not be until 110 years after her death that she would be accused of child murder. The accusations first arose only during the reign of witch-burning misogynist James I. This was the era of the Stuarts, the Tudor line was defunct and so it was possible to re-assess Henry Tudor's enemy Richard III in a more positive light. That meant finding someone other than Richard responsible for the disappearance of his nephews. Cases in which children disappear are haunting and no one has forgotten the story of the Princes in the Tower.

Margaret was an easy target, in part because of the praise that had been lavished on her by her priestly confessor John Fisher. England had undergone the Reformation. Stuart England was thoroughly Protestant and Margaret's Catholic spirituality was now condemned, while her intelligence and toughness of character were regarded with equal suspicion.

In 1646 conman George Buck, who was passing off a history composed in 1619 by a great uncle as his own, published his uncle's accusation that Margaret was a "subtle and politic lady" who had sought to kill the princes with poison and sorcery to clear the way for Henry. As we see in the novels of Philippa Gregory and the BBC's White Queen, it is as a child murderer that she is being portrayed again.

Read the rest here. It's a wonderful day when an author like Leanda de Lisle notices your blog! I've haven't read her Tudor history, or her depiction of Margaret Beaufort, but here is an article from History Today by Michael K. Jones, author of The King's Mother that provides a detailed analysis of her life and character, including this conclusion which refers to St. John Fisher's memorial of his benefactor:

The sermon which Fisher preached at Lady Margaret's month's mind compared her with Martha in the gospel, the epitome of virtuous activity. She seemed to him the ideal representative of God-fearing orderliness for their days, a noble patron tempering her power with a humility which showed itself in respect for individuals. Like Martha she was busy about her household: he notices her astute handling of discord, her care for her almsfolk, servants and strangers fed by her charity, as well as personal qualities like her readiness to learn. All the estates of the realm had reason to mourn her: the students and learned men because she was their mother and patron; the religious with whom she conversed, the clergy whom she protected, the nobility to whom she was an example of honour, and the commons for whom she acted as a mediator.

There are other features of this tender icon painted by Fisher which appear there only dimly, but more strongly in the reminiscences of Henry Parker. He pictures her sitting one New Year's Day under a cloth of state with her guests, a figure comparable for him with an Anglo-Saxon ruler, Elfleda Lady of the Mercians, or with Matilda wife of Henry I. Both of those led lives made politcally important by marriage and were symbols of piety and justice, but were also of strong passions and active characters. We get a glimpse of this side of Lady Margaret in Fisher's recollection of her saying often that if the Christian princes would war upon the enemies of Christ's faith, she would gladly go with them to wash their clothes, for the love of Jesus. Her tears of devotion, like those shed at her son's coronation, were perhaps signs of an intense nature concentrated upon its chosen aims. The aims were those demanded not only by her loyalty to God but to her son and the security of the royal house. It has been suggested that once at least her concern for wealth and power overcame her conscience: she neglected to fulfil a trust left by Cardinal Beaufort for the benefit of St Cross Hospital Winchester, although it clearly affected part of her estates.

Lady Margaret was, after all, the victim of politics from an early age: a prize passed from Suffolk to Edmund Tudor, even if she was able to accept her marriage with the latter as God's will. She learnt painfully during the dangerous years of war and of Edward IV's peace how to safeguard her interests and those of her son. She was a mature conspirator under Richard III, ready to suffer disaster before Henry's final triumph. Margaret, translator of The Mirror of Gold and inspirer of Henry Watson's translation of The Ship of Fools, had learnt the themes of reversal and penitence in a practical school. She was imbued with the courtly military ideals of her time; the recipient of a papal indulgence for her contributions to war against the Turks, the first book she commissioned from William Caxton in 1489 was of 'the noble acts and feats of war by a noble and victorious prince named Blanchardin... for the love of a noble princess called Eglantine'. As a patron, the employer of Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde and Pynson, and early helper of Skelton, she was for England a figure of Renaissance magnificence. Her epitaph was composed by Erasmus and her most moving likeness is the effigy sculpted by Torrigiano. Her great achievement was the self-discipline which allowed her to listen not just to the claims of power but to those of responsibility, whether for her own dependents or for the broader needs of religion and scholarship.