Guest post by Alex Marchant
How well do you know the story of the real King Richard III?
That was the tag line for my first two books about the man who is perhaps England’s most controversial king, The Order of the White Boar and The King’s Man. Although my third book in the sequence, King in Waiting, opens more than a year after Richard III’s death in battle and the usurpation of the English throne by a certain Henry Tudor, the tag line remains appropriate. For the story that most people connect with King Richard is still of great relevance in the years after his death – the period of King in Waiting, which explores the legacy of his life and actions.
A huge part of that legacy in many people’s eyes is the mystery of what happened to the so-called “Princes in the Tower”. This is how history tends to remember his two nephews, the sons of his brother King Edward IV who were declared illegitimate and put aside in the summer of 1483 by Parliament, which then offered the crown to Richard. I think it’s safe to say that, in the main, what people think they know about these two boys is based on Shakespeare’s dramatic play about King Richard, in which they’re portrayed as defenceless innocents cruelly murdered by Sir James Tyrell on the orders of their evil, scheming uncle.
What most people don’t realize is that the story related in the play only evolved in the decades after the alleged events – and that the story that’s come down to us from Master Shakespeare is a fabrication based on very few known facts. Shakespeare was writing in the 1590s after all – more than a hundred years after the death of his leading man – and he was also writing under Queen Elizabeth I, the granddaughter of the man who took Richard’s crown. It wouldn’t have been polite, or indeed politic, to write a play based on the historical fact of Henry Tudor being a usurper, a pretender who stole the crown primarily through the treachery of men (including his stepfather) who had sworn oaths of loyalty to his predecessor. Better to paint that predecessor as the worst of all possible villains, deserving of his fate.
Shakespeare’s primary source was Raphael Holinshed, who wasn’t even born until forty years after Richard died. Holinshed likely based his own (hi)story on that penned by Sir Thomas More, who was himself only seven at the time of the battle in 1485. More was brought up in the household of one of Richard’s bitterest enemies, John Morton, and he began and then abandoned a “history” of Richard, unfinished, in around 1515. It was found among his papers after his death in 1535 and only published many years later. It’s uncertain how heavily edited this final version was, or indeed why More abandoned it. Did he come to the conclusion it must be biased nonsense – or did he never mean it to be a “straight” history at all?
After all, More’s “history” is full of errors that any competent historian could easily have avoided (such as the age at death of King Edward IV and the length of his reign), and his story of James Tyrell being an unknown knight who offers his services to King Richard to kill his nephews has no apparent basis in fact either. The real Sir James was very well known to Richard, in whose service he had been for some years and by whom he was knighted in 1482 for his part in the Scottish wars. There is also no evidence of Sir James confessing to the murder of the boys before his execution (on a completely different charge) in 1502 – no mention of it, indeed, until More’s claim in the 1510s that “the King gave out” that Tyrell had confessed to this heinous crime. By that time, of course, both Tyrell and Tudor himself had been dead some years.
What really did happen to the boys is a lot less clear than More’s narrative might suggest. The records of the time are scant and there are signs that many were deliberately destroyed, perhaps because they didn’t fit the “official” narrative that was forming, particularly in the history of England commissioned by Tudor and written by Polydore Vergil more than twenty years after Richard’s death. Therefore definitive “facts” about the boys’ fates after the last reported sighting of them are hard to come by. Tales of their deaths by murder, or drowning as they were shipped across the English Channel to the continent, rub shoulders with rumours that they were kept incognito in various different places around England and abroad. Perhaps all we can definitely say is that they were not officially seen in public again after the summer of 1483, when we have a report of them being seen playing in the gardens of the Tower of London.
One “fact” we do know from the very early years after Richard’s death is that in 1487 someone was crowned King of England in Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin. This coronation was performed with the support of Richard’s sister Margaret, Dowager Duchess of Burgundy, his nephew John, Earl of Lincoln (who was Richard’s heir until Tudor took the throne), Viscount Francis Lovell, Richard’s great friend and chamberlain, and many lords and bishops of Ireland, plus several who had travelled over from England.
Who the “Dublin King” was is shrouded in controversy. The extant records of the time don’t even agree who it was he claimed to be. Was he a boy or an adolescent? Did he claim to be the young Earl of Warwick or a son of King Edward IV, either the elder, Edward, formerly Edward V, or the younger, Richard of Shrewsbury? And was he genuinely who he claimed to be or an impostor?
We may never know for sure, but if you’ve read my earlier two books, The Order of the White Boar and The King’s Man, you’ll probably guess which of the candidates I chose to be the hero of my third, King in Waiting, as I explored this part of King Richard’s legacy. One of the early reviews of King in Waiting says, “This theory is plausible and even seems unremarkable as the author tells it here.” “Unremarkable” is a word many authors might find underwhelming in a review. However, but in these circumstances – where the notion explored challenges five centuries of “history”, accepted by many people with little question – I have to say I was delighted to read it.
I mention this person as the “hero” of King in Waiting, but perhaps I should rather say focal point. As ever in my books, perhaps my “hero” – the leading character through whose eyes we view the action – is in fact Matthew Wansford.
As might be expected in a book aimed primarily at younger readers, Matt, a merchant’s son from York, was 12 when he entered Richard’s service as a page at Middleham Castle in the first book. In the opening chapters of the third, he is now 16 and, after almost a year, finally reunited with his fellow members of the Order of the White Boar, Alys and Roger, whose friendship sustained him during his early days at Middleham. Together with Richard’s little son Edward, the three of them formed their own secret chivalric Order in imitation of the knightly Orders of the Garter and the Bath, and swore to serve Richard faithfully. King in Waiting, together with its soon-to-be-published sequel Sons of York, relates the adventures of this teenage chivalric order in the company of the Dublin King – whoever he was… And through these books I hope to persuade readers – of whatever age – that it’s best to approach the past with a realization that all history is based on interpretation, even “official” histories, and that interpretation is always open to debate…
About the author:
A Ricardian since a teenager, and following stints as an archaeologist and in publishing, Alex now lives and works in King Richard III’s own country, not far from his beloved York and Middleham.
The discovery of Richard’s grave in 2012 prompted Alex to write The Order of the White Boar and its sequel The King’s Man to bring the story of the real man to younger readers. King in Waiting and its sequel Sons of York (due out 2022) explore his legacy in the following years.
Alex has also edited two anthologies of short stories by authors inspired by King Richard III: Grant Me the Carving of My Name and Right Trusty and Well Beloved… (both sold to raise money for Scoliosis Association UK (SAUK), which supports people with the same condition as the king), and published a standalone book, Time out of Time, following the timeslip adventures of Allie Turner who discovers a doorway into the history of an ancient English house, Priory Farm.
Alex’s books can be found on Amazon at:
My Twitter handle and Matthew Wansford’s
Instagram: AlexMarchantAuthor
Thank you so much for featuring me on the blog today. Through her work Sharon brought so very many people to a realization that King Richard III wasn’t an evil villain as he had so often been painted. I’m honoured that my own work, aimed a bringing the younger generation to a similar view, has been associated with hers in this way. I hope more and more people will reach the conclusion that the scenario in my books is ‘plausible’ and ‘unremarkable’.