Charlie Fenton’s Reviews > The Survival of Princes in the Tower: Murder, Mystery and Myth > Status Update

‘Richard III is called an ‘unnatural uncle’, which can only really be a reference to an accusation of having murdered Edward V... The reason for offering so glowing a report of his uncle becomes clear in the following sentence when Henry VII is compared unfavourably to Richard III. Having bestowed Richard III with some redeeming features, Henry... is made a worse king with no redeeming features at all’

‘Richard represented the greatest threat to the English king and so the perfect weapon for James. The lure for Richard was easy to see too. He had a ready ally in James at the moment when all others seemed to be setting him aside in the face of Henry’s clever charm offensive.’

‘The deed is signed ‘Richard of England’ in a hand that Sir Frederic Madden asserted in Documents Relating to Perkin Warbeck, with Remarks on His History in 1837 was both bold and identifiably English, a crucial point against the assertion that this was a boy born to a middle-class family from Tournai... The need to prepare a will demonstrated that Richard was fully intending to try and win his crown in battle.‘

‘Explained to the world as Perkin Warbeck, the well-travelled son of a burgess from Tournai who was coerced into impersonating Richard, Duke of York, the younger of the Princes in the Tower, the success he enjoyed and the genuine terror his career inflicted on Henry reveal at the very least that no one was so certain that the younger Prince was dead’

I wish he had included references, I cannot check any of his theories and so that will definitely have an impact on the star rating. He goes on about the real Earl of Warwick maybe being in Ireland, but gives no explanation as to who the man is in the Tower then. It is accepted that Lambert Simnel was an imposter, but it feels like Lewis is deliberately ignoring some parts of the story.

‘It seems unlikely that Henry found the boys in the Tower on his arrival in London and had them killed... If Princess Elizabeth had known her brothers were alive and well before August 1485, she would surely have found it impossible to accept Henry as her husband when they were dead immediately after his victory. The real problem for Henry was most likely that he didn’t know anything for certain.’

‘news to the former queen that her brother-in-law Richard, the new king, had put her sons to death, Elizabeth would have little other information available. Such news would also surely have served to fulfil her darkest fears, festering and growing in her seclusion... Elizabeth Woodville would believe Richard III capable of murdering two of her sons in the Tower because he had already ordered the execution of one’

‘The most politically well-informed contemporary commentary that we have appears to offer no insight whatsoever regarding the fate of the sons of Edward IV. The chronicler only offers that, as part of Buckingham’s Rebellion against Richard III in September and October 1483, a rumour was circulated by the rebels that they had been killed.’

‘This book does not seek to solve a mystery that had evaded any definitive resolution for five centuries... The purpose of this book is not to provide a definitive answer to a question that still defies answering, but to look beyond the traditional argument centred around who killed the Princes in the Tower in the summer of 1483 to ask a different question and to see where that inquiry leads.’