Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (26 page)

Let us fast-forward almost two centuries to 1674, and the remarkable discovery of the mortal remains of the two boys murdered that night. After centuries of neglect, the royal palace in the Tower had fallen into a dangerous state of decay, and in the 1650s, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England, gave orders for this old relic of royal extravagance to be pulled down. The demolition was started but was still incomplete at the Restoration of Charles II in 1660.

In July 1664, Charles got around to ordering the final destruction of the remaining ruins – including a turret on the south wall of the White Tower which had once enclosed a privy staircase leading into St John’s Chapel, reserved for the use of monarchs. Workmen removed the turret and then started to demolish the staircase inside. Burrowing into the rubble around the stair’s foundations, some ten feet below ground level, they made a startling discovery: a wooden chest containing two skeletons. The bones were clearly those of children. The taller skeleton, lying on its back, was four foot ten inches tall; the smaller, lying face down on top, was four foot six and a half inches. Those who found them had no doubt that they were looking at the remains of the missing princes.

One anonymous witness wrote, ‘This day I … saw working men dig out of a stairway in the White Tower the bones of those two Princes who were foully murdered by Richard III. They were small bones of lads in their teens and there were pieces of rag and velvet about them.’ The bones were examined by Charles’s physician and some distinguished antiquaries. All agreed that they were indeed those of the princes. The bones were placed in a stone coffin and left on display near the builders’ rubbish heap.
During this period, souvenir hunters made off with some of them, including tiny finger bones. Other bones made their way, via the collector Elias Ashmole, to his Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, whence they subsequently disappeared. To camouflage these thefts, animal bones were apparently added to the skeletons.

Finally, after four years of this degradation, Charles bestirred himself to give his ancestors a decent burial. In 1678 the bones were taken from the Tower to Westminster Abbey, where they were interred in a tomb urn designed by Sir Christopher Wren, with a Latin inscription identifying them as the lost princes. Fast-forwarding again to 1933, after pressure from Ricardian revisionists who refused to accept their hero’s guilt, the abbey authorities agreed to exhume the bones and subject them to a contemporary forensic examination by two experts. Dr Lawrence Tanner combined the roles of physician with that of keeper of Westminster’s ancient monuments; and Professor W. Wright was president of the Royal Anatomical Society.

After separating the animal bones from the human remains, they found that the bones were those of two slim young males. The bigger skeleton was that of a youth of twelve to thirteen years old (Edward was two months short of his thirteenth birthday when he vanished in September 1483), and the smaller of between nine and eleven (Richard was ten). In other words, the skeletons were exactly the same age as the boys had been when they disappeared in the Tower – a crushing rebuff to theorists who argued that they had survived there into the reign of Henry VII. The jaw of the bigger skeleton showed evidence of deep-seated dental disease, possibly osteomyelitis, which would have produced pain as well as lassitude and depression – exactly fitting Edward’s pitiful state as described by Argentine and Mancini. A red mark on the skull of the older skeleton was thought by the two experts to be a bloodstain caused by ruptured blood vessels consistent with death by stifling. The wisps of velvet that clung to the bones were another clue to the identity of the skeletons, since the material had only been invented in Renaissance Italy in the fourteenth century and was so expensive that it was reserved for royalty and nobility. Tanner and Wright concluded that there were too many coincidences between the forensic evidence and the known facts about the princes for there to be any doubt as to their identity. Despite the earnest efforts of the Ricardian revisionists the mystery of the princes in the Tower was a mystery no more.

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Paradoxically, Richard’s murder of the princes sealed his own fate. Even in the blood-soaked fifteenth century, the merciless slaughter of such ‘inocent babes’ caused shock, outrage and disgust. Popular feeling hardened against the usurper king and helped fuel the rebellion by the Duke of Buckingham – previously Richard’s closest companion in crime – which broke out soon after the disappearence of the princes. The revolt united the growing number of anti-Ricardians, ranging from Buckingham’s own powerful affinity to loyal Yorkists and their former Lancastrian enemies who had never reconciled themselves to Yorkist rule, and now looked to the only surviving Lancastrian claimant to the throne (albeit a very distant one) – the exiled Henry Tudor.

Tudor was the only son of Margaret Beaufort, a sprig of that extensive family descended from Edward III via John of Gaunt and his last wife Katherine Swynford. Henry’s father, Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, who died before his birth, was the half-brother of Henry VI on his mother’s side, and one of the two sons of Owen Tudor by Catherine de Valois. Henry Tudor had been born to his thirteen-year-old mother on 28 January 1457, two years after the first battle of St Albans had started the Wars of the Roses which he was destined to bring to a close. His birthplace was Pembroke Castle in Wales, homeland of his Tudor forebears. His youth and early manhood was a long story of insecurity, flight, exile and hair’s breadth escapes from the bloody fate the accident of his birth had almost guaranteed.

Only with his uncle Henry VI’s brief restoration to the throne in 1470 had Tudor got his first taste of a royal court. It is said that on catching sight of his tall and youthful namesake nephew, the simpleton king had cried, ‘Truly this is he unto whom both we and our adversaries must yield and give over the dominion.’ However apocryphal, this prophecy of the coming House of Tudor did indeed come to pass.

After Edward IV regained his throne in 1471, Henry Tudor’s uncle Jasper took the boy with him back into exile in Celtic Brittany where, following the death of Edward, Prince of Wales, at Tewkesbury Henry became the forlorn last hope of the Lancastrian cause. It was, therefore, in Henry’s name that Buckingham raised the standard of revolt against Richard in 1483. The revolt was nipped in the bud by Richard III’s spy system – and swamped by a nationwide storm and floods. Caught in open country by the deluge, the rebel army melted away and Buckingham himself was beheaded at Salisbury. Henry Tudor – with the luck that
attended him throughout his life – narrowly escaped a similar fate. He had sailed from Brittany with a tiny fleet only to be caught in the Channel by the storm. Limping into a West Country port with just two ships, he found the harbour surrounded by Richard’s troops. His life until then had taught Henry the habit of caution, and he sent a boat to shore to discover the allegiances of the soldiers, who shouted that they were Buckingham’s men. Fortunately Henry’s suspicions got the better of his ambition, and, ever mistrustful, he sailed back to Brittany. He would live to fight another day.

The story of Henry Wyatt, a Kentish gentleman and loyal Lancastrian who had supported Buckingham’s rebellion, is one of the most extraordinary even in the Tower’s over-eventful history, and illustrates the way that the fortress could encompass bewildering switches in fortune, with a tortured prisoner returning to the grim walls later in pomp and glory – and sometimes vice versa. The Wyatts, like other Tudor dynasties – the Dudleys, the Seymours and the Howards, not to mention the Tudors themselves – were to be closely – too closely – associated with the Tower in its bloodiest period over three generations.

Henry Wyatt was born in 1460, and was only twenty-three when he came out for Henry Tudor in Buckingham’s rebellion. Confined in the Tower, he was racked in the sadistic King Richard’s presence. As he lay agonising, his limbs stretched taut, Richard demanded:

‘Wyatt, why art thou such a fool? Henry of Richmond is a beggarly pretender; forsake him and become mine. Thou servest him for moonshine on water.’

When such entreaties had no effect on the stubborn Lancastrian, King Richard, in a rage, had Wyatt:

confined in a low and narrow cell, where he had not clothes sufficient to warm him and was a-hungered. A cat came into the cell, he caressed her for company, laid her in his bosom and won her love. And so she came to him every day and brought him a pigeon when she could catch one.

Wyatt, according to this charming family legend, persuaded his gaoler to cook the pigeons – a diet which kept him alive during the two long years of his imprisonment. When, in August 1485, Henry Tudor triumphantly rode into London after slaying Richard at Bosworth, one of his first acts
was to free the faithful Wyatt. His loyalty was amply rewarded. Wyatt prospered mightily under the Tudors, and was created a Knight of the Bath at the traditional eve-of-coronation ceremony at the Tower when Henry VIII came to the throne – and eventually rose to be the king’s treasurer. Wyatt was evidently a financial wizard, since Henry VII – notoriously mean himself – made him both custodian of his Crown jewels and keeper of the Royal Mint at the Tower, in which office Wyatt oversaw an entire recoinage of the realm.

Wyatt acquired Allington Castle in Kent and rebuilt it on Tudor lines before dying at the advanced sixteenth-century age of eighty. The grandeur and comfort of his old age were a very long way from his starved youth in the Tower. His son and heir, the poet Thomas Wyatt, had less happy associations with the fortress. A confidant and possible lover of Queen Anne Boleyn, he was imprisoned in the Tower and saw the unhappy queen walking to her execution from his cell window, commemorating the event in mournful verse. He was fortunate to escape the same fate himself. Thomas Wyatt’s son, Thomas the younger, was not so lucky.

Thomas junior’s first brush with the Tower was relatively innocuous: he was briefly confined there with his bosom friend Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, after a drunken escapade in which the aristocratic blades had amused themselves by breaking the windows of sleeping Londoners. In 1554, however, he was back – this time having led a full-scale rebellion in his traditionally restive native county of Kent. The revolt was aimed against Mary Tudor’s coming marriage to King Philip II of Spain. Wyatt, having accompanied his father on a diplomatic mission to Spain, had a horror of the Inquisition and the merciless methods of Spanish Catholicism. Soon after his revolt was crushed he was led out of his cell to Tower Hill and executed. Three successive generations of the same family suffering in the Tower is an unenviable record – equalled, but not surpassed, by the Dudley family.

The snuffing out of Buckingham’s abortive rebellion had not ended the threat to Richard III’s rule. The man he loftily misspelled as ‘Henry Tydder’ lived still, an ever present threat. Knowing that Henry would attempt another invasion, Richard sent agents to try to abduct him in Brittany. Forewarned, Henry narrowly escaped by fleeing into neighbouring France where he began to collect mercenaries for his second bid for the throne.

In the closing months of Richard’s reign it must have seemed to him as if God was smiting him for murdering the little princes. Firstly, his own only son Prince Edward wasted away and died, probably of tuberculosis. Richard was apparently devastated by grief; and his son’s death made his own hold on power even shakier, since there was now no heir to the throne. Then Queen Anne died in March 1485. It says much for Richard’s reputation that it was widely believed that he had had her poisoned – to clear the way for him to marry his own niece, Edward IV’s daughter Elizabeth of York.

By the early summer of 1485, Richard’s invasion fears were at fever pitch. He imported gunsmiths from Flanders to the Tower’s armoury to make ‘Serpentines’ – the latest state-of-the-art cannon, long, thin and mounted on a pivot to increase their range and flexibility in firing their four-pound shot. Not knowing where Henry was to land, Richard moved to Nottingham in the Midlands so he could rapidly march to any corner of the kingdom. His proclamations of treason against ‘Tydder’ took on an increasingly hysterical tone. Finally, in August 1485, the news that he had dreaded reached Richard: Henry Tudor had landed at Milford Haven in his native south Wales. With a minuscule army of French mercenaries he was on the march.

Richard III only discovered the true depths of his unpopularity when his allies deserted him as he confronted Henry’s outnumbered army near Bosworth in Leicestershire on 22 August 1485. The battle should have been a walkover for the king, but a large force led by Lord Stanley and his brother Sir William Stanley, on whom the king had been relying, deserted at the crucial moment and joined Henry. Richard, screaming, ‘Treason!’ rather than Shakespeare’s ‘My kingdom for a horse!’, was cut down in the Midlands mud.

The battered and bleeding little corpse was slung unceremoniously across a horse’s back and Richard’s own herald, trailing his white boar banner, was forced to lead his late master’s body back to Leicester, where he was hastily buried. On the battlefield, a servant of Henry Tudor’s mother Margaret Beaufort found the gold coronet that had surmounted Richard’s helmet lying in a hawthorn bush and took it to his master, Lord Stanley. Hastily making up for his late intervention on the winning side, Stanley placed it on Henry’s head, shouting, ‘King Henry! King Henry!’ Few realised it at the time, but a new dynasty was born at that
moment and the wars which had blighted and bled England for as long as almost anyone could remember were almost over.

Almost – but not quite. No usurper could be completely confident, and just as Henry Tudor’s ancestor and namesake Henry IV spent his reign foiling plots and putting down revolts, so Henry VII’s hold on his newly acquired throne was decidedly shaky. Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, the sister of Edward IV and Richard III, was behind numerous Yorkist plots to regain the throne. Since almost all the genuine Yorkist heirs were dead or jailed, Margaret was obliged to support pretenders. The only living Yorkist with a genuine claim was young Edward, Earl of Warwick, teenage son of the union between the unlamented Duke of Clarence, and Isabel, daughter of Warwick the Kingmaker. Richard III had taken the precaution of locking the lad up in Yorkshire, and after Bosworth Henry VII had him brought to the Tower and kept under strict guard. Either because he had barely known freedom or because of a genetic weakness, young Warwick had the feeble mental fragility of a previous Tower incumbent – Henry VI – and hardly posed a serious threat to the throne.