Great Tales from English History, Book 2 (7 page)

More than five hundred years later a copy of Caxton’s first edition of Chaucer became the most expensive book ever sold —
knocked down at auction for £4.6 million. But in the fifteenth century the obvious appeal of the newly printed books lay in
their value for money. Books became so commonplace that snobs sometimes employed scribes to copy Caxton’s printed editions
back into manuscript — while both Church and government became alarmed at the access
to new ideas that the printing press offered to a widening public.

Over the centuries Caxton’s innovation would marvellously stimulate diversity in thinking, but in one important respect its
impact was to standardise. Caxton loved to write personal prefaces to his publications, explaining the background of the new
book he was sharing with his readers, and in one of these he describes the difficulties of being England’s first mass publisher.
He was in his study, he relates, feeling rather bereft, looking for a new project to get his teeth into, and happened to pick
up the recently published French version of Virgil’s
Aeneid.
The editor in him couldn’t resist trying to translate the great epic poem into English. Taking a pen, he wrote out a page
or two. But when he came to read through what he had written, he had to wonder whether his customers in different corners
of England would be able to understand it, since‘common English that is spoken in one shire varies from another’.

To make the point he recounted the tale of a group of English merchants who, when their ship was becalmed at the mouth of
the Thames, decided to go ashore in search of a good breakfast. One of them asked for
some’eggys’,
to be told by the Kentish wife that she did not understand French. Since the merchant himself only spoke and understood English,
he started to get angry, until one of his companions said he would like some
’eyren’
— and the woman promptly reached for the egg basket.

’Loo,’ exclaimed Caxton,‘what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte — egges or eyren?’

Even in this account you may notice that Caxton himself
first spelled the word
’eggys’,
then
’egges’
a few lines later. As the printer-publisher produced more and more books — and when he died in 1491 he was on the point of
printing his hundredth — he made his own decisions about how words should be spelled. His choices tended to reflect the language
of the south-east of England, with which he was familiar — he was proud to come from Kent,’where I doubt not is spoken as
broad and rude English as is in any place of England.’

Many of Caxton’s spelling decisions and those of the printers who came after him were quite arbitrary. As they matched letters
to sounds they followed no particular rules, and we live with the consequences to this day. So if you have ever wondered why
a bandage is‘wound’ around a‘wound’, why‘cough’ rhymes with‘off’ while‘bough’ rhymes with cow’, and why you might shed a‘tear’
after seeing a‘tear’ in your best dress or trousers, you have William Caxton to thank for the confusion.

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HEN EDWARD IV DIED EARLY IN APRIL
1483, his elder son Edward was in Ludlow on the Welsh border, carrying out his duties as Prince of Wales. The twelve-year-old
was duly proclaimed King Edward V, and leisurely arrangements were made for him to travel to London for his coronation. But
on the 30th of that month, with little more than a day’s riding to go, the royal party was intercepted by the King’s uncle,
Richard, Duke of Gloucester, at Stony Stratford on the outskirts of modern-day Milton Keynes.

The thirty-year-old Richard was the energetic and ambitious younger brother of Edward IV. He had been ruling
the north of England with firm efficiency,and he claimed to have uncovered a conspiracy to seize control of the new King.
He took charge of his nephew and escorted him back to London where, after a spell in the bishop’s palace, the young Edward
V was dispatched for safekeeping into the royal apartments in the Tower. There the boy was joined on 16 June by his nine-year-old
brother, Prince Richard of York.

But only ten days later, claiming that the two boys were illegitimate, Uncle Richard proclaimed himself King. It was an outlandish
charge, but he was formally crowned King Richard III on 6 July 1483, and the children were never seen at liberty again. With
a poignant report in the Great Chronicle of London that they were glimpsed that summer‘shooting and playing in the garden
of the Tower’, the young Edward V and his brother vanished from history.

Few people at the time doubted that the King had disposed of them. But there was no solid evidence of foul play until, nearly
two centuries later, workmen digging at the bottom of a staircase in the Tower of London discovered a wooden chest containing
the skeletons of two children. The taller child was lying on his back, with the smaller one face down on top of him.‘They
were small bones of lads…’ wrote one eyewitness,and there were pieces of rag and velvet about them.’

The reigning monarch of the time, Charles II, ordered an inquiry. All agreed that the skeletons must be those of the boy king
Edward V and his younger brother, murdered in 1483 by their wicked uncle. In 1678 the remains were ceremonially reburied in
Westminster Abbey, with full dignity, in an urn beneath a black-and-white marble altar.

But over the years historians and physicians queried the authenticity of the bones. Did they really belong to the so-called‘Princes
in the Tower? And even if they did, what proof was there that they were murdered by anybody, let alone by their uncle? By
1933 the controversy was such that King George V, grandfather of the present Queen, authorised the opening of the tomb.

The two medical experts who examined the contents came to the conclusion that the remains of the young skeletons were almost
certainly those of Richard III’s nephews. Both indicated a slender build, with very small finger bones. Dental evidence set
the age of one at eleven to thirteen years old, the smaller at between nine and eleven. Professor W. Wright, a dental surgeon
who was president of the Anatomical Society of Great Britain, declared that the structure of the jaws and other bones in both
skeletons established a family link, and he further suggested that a red mark on the facial bones of the elder child was a
bloodstain caused by suffocation.

The notion of the victims having been suffocated made a neat connection with the first detailed account of the boys’ deaths
by Sir Thomas More back in 1514. Writing thirty years after the event, More pieced his story together through first-hand research
— plus a certain amount of what he honestly described as‘divining upon conjectures’. Acting on Richard’s orders, he alleged,
two men had crept into the princes’ bedchamber about midnight,‘and suddenly lapped them up among the clothes, so bewrapped
them and entangled them, keeping down by force the feather bed and pillows hard into their mouths, that within a while, smothered
and stifled, their breath failing, they gave up to God their innocent souls’. More went on to describe how the murderers then
buried the bodies‘at the stair foot, meetly deep under the ground, under a great heap of stones’.

We shall meet Thomas More again in a later chapter. His name has become a byword for both learning and courage in standing
up for principle, and his unpublished account was written at the behest of no particular patron. While clearly disapproving
of Richard III, he nonetheless made several attempts in his story to separate fact from rumour. But his research was seized
on by others for commercial and political reasons — most notably by William Shakespeare, whose
Tragedy of King Richard III,
first performed in 1597, gave birth to one of the most exquisitely chilling villains of English drama:’Conscience is but a
word that cowards use…’

In Shakespeare’s play we see the King ruthlessly order the murder of his two nephews, along with the deaths of a whole catalogue
of other rivals and opponents — actually uttering at one point the immortal words‘Off with his head!’ The evil that festers
in the usurper’s mind is graphically symbolised by his twisted and deformed body, reflecting sixteenth-century superstitions
that Richard spent a full two years in his mother’s womb, before emerging with teeth fully developed, a mane of black hair
and a hideously hunched back.

In reality, King Richard III was lean and athletic. His portraits show quite a handsome-looking man, who may possibly have
carried one shoulder a little higher than the other but who was certainly not the crookback of legend. Modern X-rays show
that the higher shoulder in
one portrait was painted in afterwards. He was a devout Christian — something of a Puritan. He was an efficient administrator.
And while he was certainly ruthless in sweeping aside those who stood in his path to the throne — including his helpless nephews
— he was not the hissing psychopath of Shakespeare’s depiction. The popular image of‘Crookback Dick’ is quite certainly a
defamation — one of history’s most successful hatchet jobs — and it is not surprising that over the centuries people have
come to Richard’s defence. Founded in 1924, the Fellowship of the White Boar, now known as the Richard III Society, has become
the most thriving historical club in the entire English-speaking world, with branches in Britain and North America.

In a testament to the English sense of fair play, the Ricardians, as they call themselves, campaign tirelessly to rescue their
hero’s reputation, and central to their argument is the absence of solid evidence linking Richard III directly to the disappearance
of his nephews. More himself wrote, for example, that, having initially been buried beneath the staircase in the Tower, the
princes’ bodies were later dug up and reburied some distance away. So, argue the Ricardians, the skeletons discovered in the
1670s could not possibly have been the princes — who might even have escaped from the Tower.

As for the‘experts’ of 1933, their techniques do not stand modern forensic scrutiny. To take one instance, there is no possibility
that a single stain on an ancient bone could be plausibly linked to suffocation. In 1984 no less than four hours of television
were devoted to a court-room inquest and trial in which this evidence and much more was minutely
dissected and argued over by prominent lawyers and historians. Did Richard III murder the Princes in the Tower? The jury reached
a verdict of‘not guilty’.

The debate will doubtless go on for ever — or, at least, until some conclusive new evidence is discovered. Modern DNA analysis
could determine, for example, whether or not the bones that have lain in Westminster Abbey since 1678 are genetically linked
to those of the boys’ father, Edward IV, lying for over five centuries in his tomb at Windsor — though that would not tell
us who disposed of the children.

Richard III’s contemporaries had little doubt:’There was much whispering among the people,’ recorded the Great Chronicle,‘that
the king had put the children of King Edward to death.’

’I saw men burst into tears when mention was made of [the boy king] after his removal from men’s sight,’ wrote the Italian
traveller, Dominic Mancini,‘and already there was suspicion that he had been done away with.’

Medieval folk were not surprised by skulduggery and death at the top. In the previous two centuries England had seen three
kings deposed (Edward II, Richard II, Henry VI), and all were subsequently disposed of in sinister circumstances. But to eliminate
children — and your own brother’s children — went one big step beyond that. Even if the physical evidence to convict Richard
III of murder was missing, he was guilty of appalling neglect, for he had had a duty of care to his nephews. When it came
to explaining what had happened to them, he never even tried to offer a cover story.

In any case, history’s debate over the’Princes in the Tower’ lets Richard off too lightly. The younger boy was indeed a
prince, but the elder one, Edward V, was a properly proclaimed and fully acknowledged king, until his uncle went riding out
to meet him at Stony Stratford on that late spring day in 1483, Richard might wriggle off the hook of modern TV justice. But
he was found guilty in the court of his own times, and he was soon made to pay the full penalty.