The Missing Princes Project: Update!

 

Perkin Warbeck or Richard, due of York?

Earlier this year, I encouraged you to watch The Lost King, a movie about finding Richard III's bones under a car park in Leicester in 2012. It certainly generated renewed interest in England's maligned (by Shakespeare et al) king. 

At the end of November, another astonishing revelation about Richard emerged, spearheaded again by Philippa Langley, the discoverer of the location of Richard's bones. Not satisfied with that incredible success, Philippa then launched The Missing Princes Project, a research project attempting to solve the centuries-old mystery of what happened to the princes in the Tower, who disappeared in the summer of 1483, never to be seen again. You ask the majority of English people if they think they know what happened to them, and, up until November, I guarantee you 80 percent would have said, "Oh, Richard III murdered them." Even I, who is one of Richard's greatest champions, believe someone (but NOT Richard) disposed of them in 1483, and they did not live into Henry Tudor's reign.

Was I wrong? Excitingly for Richard's innocence, I probably was. Frustratingly for me, I got their fates wrong in all six of my books! It's a bain of writing historical fiction; new information is always surfacing.

After reading Philippa's book, watching the PBS Secrets of Dead Princes in the Tower episode, and attending a Richard III Society member-only Zoom with presenters Philippa and historian Annette Carson, I now believe those two boys ended up on the Continent and became Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, the two pretenders who threatened Henry in the first decade of his reign.

Philippa's research project involved more than 300 volunteers, from UK, France, Belgium, Holland, and the US. Archives were searched, dusty documents discovered, previously untapped sources tapped, and a all this was carried out like a police-style investigation, which helped ferret out hitherto unknown proof that both boys lived into Henry Tudor's reign. After more than 300,000 files are accumulated on Philippa's computer so far, still she searches. Indomitable.

If you want to learn more and judge for yourself, then read both Philippa's aforementioned book (published this November) and Annette Carson's latest edition of The Maligned King, which architecturally refutes the Thomas More (and hence Shakespeare) story that the boys were murdered by their Uncle Richard and were buried under the White Tower stairs. It is all fascinating stuff!

Is the proof undeniable? Not everyone thinks so. I would like more solid evidence of their presence in Europe after 1485 (DNA would be nice!), but unfortunately Perkin Warbeck (or Richard, duke of York) was executed in 1499, and his body buried with other unknowns in a churchyard hit by a bomb in the Blitz. As for the older boy, Edward V (Lambert Simnel), we have no evidence of him after 1486.

Before I get chastised for not mentioning the bones found in 1673, thought to be the princes' and now residing in an urn in Westminster Abbey, the RIII Society is waiting for King Charles to give permission to open and study them. Queen Elizabeth refused. Annette Carson has found good reason why they probably are NOT the adorable boys from that long-ago mystery. Time alone will tell.

But as we are discovering in this compelling case, "Truth is the daughter of time."