An important part of this case is the suggestion that propaganda issued by the regimes of Henry VII, his son Henry VIII and his grandchildren Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I has smothered the truth about the princes’ fate and unfairly blackened the reputation of Richard III. It is therefore generally assumed that the memory of Edward V was an important part of the politics and culture of the century following his disappearance and probable murder in 1483. My new article for History, the journal of the Historical Association, considers the material culture associated with Edward and contributes to an understanding of his fate and how it was viewed in the reigns of Richard III, Henry VII, and beyond. This draws on the idea that historical memory is supported by ‘sites of memory’ (‘les lieux de mémoire’, in the phrase popularised by the French historian Pierre Nora), which might be both physical objects and non-material ones, including places, ceremonies and monuments. In the article, I demonstrate that, in stark contrast to the experience of other elite figures in the period, Edward’s memory was not promoted and supported through any of the potential lieux de mémoire which might have been preserved, created or adapted for the purpose. The decades to the middle of the sixteenth century saw little if anything by way of an emerging tradition of visual presentations of the king, there was no indication of the emergence of physical locations in which his memory might be cultivated, and textual references remain sparse.
A previously overlooked reference to Edward V’s gold chain, in the possession of the Capell family early in the sixteenth century, provides an important perspective on the remarkably limited interest in Edward as a personality and in his fate in the years after his disappearance. And while there is a clear possibility that the chain came to the Capell family in some neutral way, as Edward’s property was distributed in the aftermath of his disappearance, there is also the possibility that it came as a result of his murder – and through the Capells’ connection with the alleged murderer, Sir James Tyrell. That possibility makes even more significant the close association between the Capell family and the prominent lawyer and judge Sir John More (d. 1530), and his son Sir Thomas, author of the first detailed account of the death of the princes in The History of King Richard the Third.
Eliza Hartrich [EH]: Thank you very much, Jayne. It's a real pleasure to have Tim Thornton with us today, whose works I know I've used extensively in my teaching on the Wars of the Roses. And to start with, and in that vein, I know my students often get very confused when it comes to the Wars of the Roses about who's who and who dies when. So I was wondering, Tim, if you could just remind us who the Princes in the Tower were and why their case is so controversial.
Tim Thornton [TT]: Thanks, Eliza, Jayne, and it's a great pleasure to be able to join you and to talk about what I think is some really exciting new research, which is being published through the journal History.
This takes us to that extraordinary period of intermittent civil conflict in England in the 15th century and in particular to the situation in 1483 when King Edward IV died. Edward had successfully overthrown the reigning monarch of what we know as the Lancastrian dynasty, Henry VI, although that success had been hard won and he had, for example, briefly been exiled before returning in triumph at the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471. When Edward IV died at the age of just 40, his surviving sons were Edward, who had now become King Edward V, and his brother Richard, Duke of York. They were aged just 12 and 9 years old, and they are the princes to whom we refer. Now that death of Edward IV at the age of just 40 and the succession of a 12-year-old son prompted a struggle for power between the dowager queen, Elizabeth Woodville, and her supporters on one side, and on the other, the boy's uncle, Edward IV's surviving younger brother, who was called Richard, Duke of Gloucester.
Now the boys were lodged in the Tower of London, initially ostensibly in preparation for the coronation of Edward V, but Richard soon had them declared illegitimate, and they disappeared from sight in the following weeks, never to be seen alive again. So Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was now crowned as King Richard III. He himself was overthrown just a couple of years later, defeated at Bosworth Field by Henry, Earl of Richmond in 1485. Henry became King Henry VII.
The disappearance of the princes was now more openly attributed to Richard, who, for example, in the first parliament of Henry's reign was said to be responsible for shedding infants’ blood. And gradually, the story takes firmer form, and a name starts to be mentioned as having organised the murders for Richard, for example, a servant of his called Sir James Tyrrell. So Henry VII and his regime have obvious reasons for wanting to blacken the reputation of Richard III, given that they'd overthrown him to take the crown. So it's entirely logical to question every allegation Henry VII and his successors made about Richard, including, most centrally, this issue, the fate of the Princes in the Tower. As a result, the most detailed early account of Richard's seizing of power and the alleged death of the princes, and that's the account written famously by Sir Thomas More about 30 years after Richard's downfall, has come in for some sustained criticism.
Supporters of Richard III, and there are many, many of them, have highlighted, for example, some significant errors in More's account, including some central names, and ages, of key characters in the story. So, Eliza, this is a period of extraordinary and complex civil conflict, and at the heart of it is the disappearance of two princes and the allegations about their fate directed at Richard III.
EH: Yes. And this is the topic that I know when I teach the Wars of the Roses, students are always really fascinated by Richard III and the Princes in the Tower. And they ask me, what do you think happened to them? Which side do you fall on? And I always say, we really don't know, and there's no way that we could know. But you, in your very popular 2021 article that you published with us in History, and in the article that we have coming out in History, have new have shown new research that sheds new light on the fate of the Princes in the Tower. So we might actually be able to know something about what happened. So I was wondering if you could talk us through what your new research has shown about the fate of the Princes in the Tower.
TT: I think that it's always important to remember that historians, given that we work with imperfect evidence in a contested field, are unlikely ever to deliver the standard of proof that might be required, for example, in a modern day courtroom, a judgment beyond reasonable doubt. We work on the balance of probabilities, which is the reality for so many other areas of life even today. And I think most importantly, the research that I've done and published through History is about the ways in which memories are cultivated, managed and sustained, and how they eventually take form as history. And in particular, obviously, how those memories were managed, developed, to take the form of the story that we now know about the deaths of Edward V and Richard Duke of York. As I've said, the most detailed early account of their of their deaths is the account written by Sir Thomas More. And my initial approach was to test More's history, in particular, to test the idea that instead of being essentially propagandistic, fictional based on imaginary characters, or at least ones who've been massively distorted in terms of their presence and role in the account, to test the possibility that the people More says were involved in the murder of the princes were real people and that we might find out more about them. So just to give specific examples, and this is the approach that was published back in 2021, I looked at the two alleged murderers, the people who were supposed to have actually carried out this horrific crime. They are two men called Miles Forrest and John Dighton. They were, according to More, employed to kill the princes by Richard’s servant Sir James Tyrrell, that name that I mentioned is starting to appear in historical accounts, after Richard's overthrow.
Now we know, and we have known for a while, that Miles Forrest was a real person. His widow was rewarded by Richard III in 1484, about a year after the princes disappeared. What I discovered was that Miles Forrest not only was a real person, but he had two sons and that they were active at the courts of Henry VII and particularly Henry VIII. One of them was a servant of Henry VIII himself; the other was the servant of his great minister, Thomas Cardinal Wolsey; and those sons were called Edward Forrest and Miles Forrest. There's a clear connection – Edward, for example, is mentioned in the grant made by Richard in 1484, albeit he was a child at the time.
And then, and I think this was probably most powerful in terms of articulating the implications here, I found a letter which directly connected Thomas More and Miles Forrest junior. Because when Thomas More was working on his history of Richard III, he was on an embassy from England to the Low Countries in 1515. He was in Bruges. It's quite a famous episode because this is the period when he writes his very famous book, Utopia. It's likely that at this point, at the least, he was working through the ideas that he expresses in his history of Richard III. But extraordinarily, during that embassy, we can show now that Miles Forrest junior carried messages between Moore's embassy, Bruges, and the court back in England. And we have, for example, a direct testimony of this, a letter with More's signature at the foot and Forrest's name as messenger at the head.
And that discovery caused a bit of a stir a couple of years ago when it was published in History, the Historical Association’s scholarly journal. It showed that when More was writing about the prince's murders, he wasn't making up names, he wasn't randomly selecting people who might have nothing to do with the events in London in the summer of 1483. It showed that More was writing about real people who were closely associated with Richard's coup and who themselves were either alive at the time he was writing or members, very closely related members, of their family were alive and directly in touch with More at the point that he was creating this work. That discovery places More's account back centre stage when it comes to understanding what might have happened to the Princes in the Tower.
EH: Oh, fascinating stuff. And as you say, More's work has been so influential in current accounts of Richard III and in particular on Shakespeare's work on Richard III as well, so it leaves a very long legacy. But, as you've just been explaining, he had connections with people who might have known what happened. So I was wondering if you could expand a bit on the relationship between memory and the creation of history. When does individual memory of an event become history as we know it?
TT: And that's the process that More is centrally involved with. A period about 30 years after the events that are described, those traumatic events for everyone involved, are now being resolved into a coherent written account, where previously there had only been scraps of poorly structured individual reflection on events. That process of the creation of historical account is taking place and we can observe it. I think, Eliza, the really exciting thing is that there's a further perspective added by the discovery that's being published in History now.
My earlier paper showed that there were direct connections between More and the people he accused of killing the princes. But, actually, we can take this further. Until now, it's been generally accepted that the princes disappeared without trace in 1483. Of course, there are no signs of any bodies until a disputed discovery at the Tower 200 years later. There's no indication of the survival of any pieces of property, no clothing, no jewels, no weapons, nothing at all. The princes apparently, until now, disappeared without the slightest hint of a physical trail of evidence behind them.
But I say until now because the discovery that we're publishing in History is a record of something very personal and highly valued by Edward V, and that is the young king's chain. It's likely this was a precious piece – powerful men in this period wore very flamboyant chains or collars partly as an expression of wealth, but also of their associations and their identification, very, very important piece of personal property. And that chain appears in a will written in 1516 and proved in 1522, so in this period about 30 years after Edward's disappearance. And that is striking in itself, but what really matters is in whose hands that chain rests when we now discover it.
The will in question is the will of a woman, a very wealthy woman called Margaret, Lady Capell, whose husband, Sir William Capell, had been Lord Mayor of London in 1503-4 and in 1510. And here the connections begin to add to our understanding of what might have happened to Edward and his brother and the ways in which stories about that fate are now woven into formal history. But Capell was a very well connected man. His wealth meant he could associate with members of the nobility and the gentry, the social elite. He married a prominent heiress. So Margaret Lady Capell, the person who wrote this will, was a daughter of Sir John Arundel. She and her sisters married some very important people indeed, not just to William Capell, but also others who were peers of the realm and, interestingly, one Sir James Tyrrell. So by 1516, Edward V's gold chain is in the hands of the brother-in-law of Sir James Tyrrell, the man that Thomas More says organised Edward's murder. And then there's even more than that because Capell was a very successful businessman. We've said already that he ended up as mayor of London. He was immensely wealthy. He was involved in many, many different transactions, including significant property transactions. Successful businessmen need good lawyers, and the lawyer on whom Capell seems to rely the most and with whom effectively he's often entrusting his wealth, his business, his private affairs, is one Sir John More. John More appears again and again in Capell's legal business in the 30 years after the disappearance of the princes. And so John More has a son, you've already guessed this, I'm sure, who is also a lawyer, a highly educated and inquiring man, none other than Sir Thomas More himself. So not only does Thomas Moore know someone like Miles Forrest, the son of the man he says killed the princes, his father is the legal adviser of the man who, by the middle of the 1510s, owns Edward V's chain, and who is also the brother-in-law of James Tyrrell, who More indicated organised these murders. When Moore was writing, therefore, when this formal historical account was being woven out of the memories and the individual involvements of so many people, More was in close touch with a family who at least owned one item of Edward V's possessions, and whose connection to the king appears probably at least in part to be through the man More alleges organised the murders. So that pattern of interactions, of recollections, of memories, of personal engagements is becoming richer and more indicative of the credibility of More's work.
EH: Yes. On that note, I was wondering how should we treat More's history of Richard III now? We've been dismissing it for centuries as highly sensationalised propaganda. But you as a historian, what do you think, how does your research change the way we should be using this source?
TT: I think it's very hard to describe it as propaganda, certainly in the way that it's originally conceived and disseminated. Because it's not printed, or distributed in any kind of significant organised way; it appears initially to have been produced only in a very small number of handwritten versions that even members of his own family don't seem to be aware of. It's very hard to describe that as a piece of propaganda. I think the other ways in which More's account have been described and constructed, for example, as great literature, as great political philosophy, I mean, absolutely. I think it is. He was a very, very, very, intelligent man, and he wrote extremely well, and he thought very hard about what he was writing. I think it is a work of great literature, great political philosophy, but it is also pretty good history. I think it is a genuine attempt to recover what happened in a period of turmoil and crisis, which wasn't well understood at the time. You've got to remember that often these political crises, even people involved in them, they don't have that overarching perspective that gives them a clear understanding of a coherent narrative or even a good understanding of why things are happening. And even still into the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII, that period of turmoil and crisis is not well understood; it needs reconstructing by someone working as a historian, like, like More.
EH: Yes. It sort of falls in between the cracks as it were, between something that's a primary source that was written at the time the events happened and something that we tend to see as history that's written with a great deal of hindsight. So as you say, there's some difficulty in categorizing exactly what it is, Moore's history of King Richard III. What type of history – is it history? Is it journalism? And your point about it being more in the history side is really, really helpful. And you also speak to something I always tell my students, in that whenever we discuss something as propaganda, you need to consider who's reading it. It's not very effective propaganda if it's not being deliberately disseminated, if it's not having a wide audience. So, yes, that's a point that I will definitely be making next time I teach the Wars of the Roses and Richard III.
TT: I think, Eliza, there's another important context that that we need to remember here, which is that not only is this a complex period from which England is emerging and about which More is attempting to construct a history, It's also a period, as I've said, of really brutal civil conflict. And I think we too often forget that the years after 1485 are not a period of the slate wiped clean, all begun anew. However much, for example, I think Henry VII deliberately tried to ensure that that was, as far as possible, the case, this was a period in which everyone who had lived through recent events had in some way been compromised by their experiences and their involvements. The Wars of the Roses, as we call them, the crisis of 1483, they are a brutally complex and embarrassing time for English people. They've all been through a civil war. Very few can claim to have been consistently on the winning side, consistently opposed to the enemies of Henry VII. A lot of people around in the England of Henry VII and Henry VIII had been part of Richard III's regime to some extent. Some had been very closely complicit in what one could call its worst crimes, such as the execution of William Lord Hastings in June 1483, which I think is at best a judicial murder, as Richard went through the process of seizing the throne. Nobody in the period after 1485 is particularly keen to go picking over the awkward details of this story, or at least very few people are. When they do, and More is one of the leaders in that initiative, they are picking their way through a very, very difficult period of the recent past. One of the things I've suggested is that we understand that we would understand the England of Henry VII and Henry VIII better if we looked at some comparable examples of post-conflict societies and the ways in which recent memories are treated, when histories do start to be written, how they're written very much in the light of the trauma that those societies have recently experienced.
EH: Yes. Yes, and that constant reminder that these are actual people who did experience trauma. And as you say, we can't just treat them as names and people on a page who have no emotions and painful past memories that might be affecting their actions.
To switch gears a little bit, the research that you've been describing has generated quite a lot of interest. And as I'm sure you're aware, your 2021 article for history was the most read and cited for our journal. So, could you tell us a bit about what audiences this new research into the Princes in the Tower has reached?
TT: Yes, it's been very exciting and very gratifying actually, because I do think that being a historian should be being part of a dialogue, and being part of a dialogue with the widest possible audience. There is so much existing interest in Richard in academic circles, and even more in a wider audience. And of course that tends to focus to centre on the fate of the princes. I guess, you know, it is the greatest missing persons and possibly murder mystery in the whole of British history. So it's not surprising people are interested in it. The disappearance of a reigning monarch, just disappearing, and probably murdere, that is an extraordinary phenomenon. So there's been wide media coverage here in the UK, and also, I have to say fascinatingly, internationally too, including, in in countries where I guess you might possibly expect that to be the case, like Australia, the US, and Canada, but also recently in Japan, and across Europe. So it really has reached audiences in a way that I haven't really expected it to, and I'm very grateful to History as a journal for enabling that.
I think the most powerful example of the way in which the research reached new audiences actually is through the BBC Studios series Lucy Worsley Investigates that's run several times now on BBC 1, BBC 2, and also internationally, for example, through PBS in the US and in Canada. It really has enabled an audience that perhaps isn't normally engaged in this kind of history to see discoveries being made, and to be part of the process of thinking about what they might mean for the way we understand Richard's reign and that period of the past.
EH: So how do you deal with that as a historian when you're on a broadcast TV programme? What's it like translating your own primary source research into material for a mass audience?
TT: It's quite an exciting process, actually. I suppose my strong sense has always been that, there is a really dynamic power in communicating research findings, primary research findings. And actually TV is a great format through which to do that. If you think about some of the most successful history formats of the last few years on TV, like Who do you think you are?, they do make viewers or engage viewers in history as a process of research and discovery, whether it's personal research and discovery or a more general process of discovery. The recent research on Richard III, recent coverage of Richard III, does exemplify that doesn't it, really, when you think about the massive response to the project around the discovery of the body of Richard under a car park in Leicester, and then the associated process of archaeological, scientific and historical research that went on from that discovery, it’s shed so much light on Richard the man, and especially his death. And that process of discovery in a situation where it might have originally felt these details were lost, fundamentally lost, does prove really, really compelling. More recently than that, the missing princes projects driven as with the car park discovery by Philippa Langley and the Richard III Society, finding recent broadcast format through programmes involving high profile personalities like Rob Rinder, again, it showed how effective TV can be in presenting new evidence, subjecting it to forensic examination. It really did strike me how powerful that is as a way of engaging around historical reserve.
EH: Thank you. And, yeah, as you say, there's engaging with the public doesn't mean dumbing down the research. And, actually, as we've shown with your example, it is that very close forensic analysis of sources that the general public is often interested in, following that process. And it's one of the reasons we're so grateful that you published with History because part of our raison d'être as a journal is presenting the highest scholarly research, but in an accessible way to audiences of both academics and teachers and the wider public. So thank you very much for sharing your research with us.
TT: Thank you, Eliza. Can I can I thank you and Jayne and the whole History team once again for the opportunities that the journal's presented? As you say, the journal is a real guiding light in terms of that goal of making high quality social research available to the widest possible audience, and it's great to be part of that.
EH: Thank you.
JG: Thanks so much, folks. That's really, really fascinating. You know, lots of things to think about; the themes I took away from that – memory and the creation of history, sources, and how we use them. And I think fundamentally, speaking to both of your final points there, how we bring our research into the classroom, how do we make it accessible to people, and how that feeds into our teaching and everything, which is fantastic. And that was absolutely fascinating. Obviously, it's not my period of expertise, so I really, really enjoyed that. So thank you for your time, Tim and Eliza, this morning.
And I echo what you say about History. I mean, what has been wonderful through my involvement in the journal is being exposed to the richness of our research in our discipline, and that has been a great privilege. And I have learned so much beyond my little narrow involvement in in historical research.
So, Tim, I very much look forward to learning more, and this interview obviously complements the journal article authored by yourself and published, or forthcoming, with History titled ‘Sir William Capell and a Royal Chain: the Afterlives (and Death) of King Edward V’, as well as your forthcoming documentary. So thank you very much.
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