Princes in the Tower (30 page)

21. The Skeletons in the Tower

Because Tyrell's confession was suppressed and More's account of it remained long unpublished, the fate of the Princes in the Tower remained a matter for speculation during the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII. More himself says that their deaths had 'so far come into question that some remain yet in doubt whether they were in King Richard's days destroyed or no'. It appears then that there were some who believed that the Princes were not dead and others who believed that Henry VII had murdered them. As we have seen, More, who had no reason to like Henry VII, was firmly of the opinion that Richard III was the guilty party. After More's book was published it rapidly gained acceptance as the most veracious account of what had actually happened and became the basis of all subsequent memoirs on the subject of the Princes written during the Tudor and early Stuart periods. Shakespeare's play,
Richard III,
derived its plot from Holinshed, who based his chronicle on Hall's, who used More's history almost word for word in his own chronicle.

Between them, More and Shakespeare did more than any other writers to publicise Richard Ill's evil reputation. By Shakespeare's time Richard had become the arch villain, capable of any crime, however terrible. More's history is a moral tale about tyranny; Shakespeare's play is a study of evil.

No further searches were made in the Tower for the bones of the Princes. Yet Edward V and York were not the only children to disappear in that grim fortress during a turbulent age. In November 1539, when Henry VIII sent his cousins, Henry Courtenay, Marquess of Exeter, and Henry Pole, Lord Montagu, to the Tower on a charge of conspiring to overthrow him, he ordered also the imprisonment of all the other members of their families including their sons, Edward Courtenay and Henry Pole, both aged twelve. Both Exeter and Montagu went to the block. Afterwards, the King ordered that Lady Exeter, her son Henry Pole and Henry's aged grandmother, Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury -- daughter of Clarence and mother of Lord Montagu -- remain in the Tower.

His Yorkist cousins had been a thorn in Henry's side for many years, and his former warmth towards the family had changed rapidly to bitter loathing after Cardinal Reginald Pole, Montagu's brother, had written a virulent tract denouncing his marriage to Anne Boleyn. Where the Pole family was concerned, Henry VIII now acted like a man obsessed, and this explains why he extended his vindictiveness to the innocent sons of Exeter and Montagu, who had played no part in any treasonable conspiracy, and why, because he was a Pole, young Henry fared worse than Edward Courtenay.

In 1541 a northern rebellion against the King gave Henry the excuse he needed to execute the ageing Countess of Salisbury, who was informed of her impending doom only a short time beforehand and whose sentence was carried out with horrific butchery. Henry Pole, then aged fourteen, was expected to follow her to the block, but even Henry VIII dared not risk alienating public opinion -- already shocked at the fate of Lady Salisbury -- by putting so young a person to death. Instead he ordered that the boy be placed in solitary confinement, and refused to allow him a tutor, although his cousin Edward Courtenay enjoyed such a privilege. The King intended that Henry Pole be 'poorly and strictly kept, and not desired to know anything'. Such treatment was not dissimilar to that meted out by Henry VII to Warwick half a century earlier.

Edward Courtenay remained a prisoner until he was released by Mary I in 1553, but it is certain that Henry Pole never left the Tower. He was alive in 1542, as a record of payment for his meals attests. But after that, he disappears from the records, and it can only be assumed that he died in the Tower, an event that would without doubt have been welcomed by Henry VIII.

Henry Pole may have died from natural causes or as a consequence of the rigours of his imprisonment -- it has been suggested by several modern writers that he was starved to death. Certainly there was no-one close to him left alive to ask awkward questions, and it may well be that Henry VIII, once the furore about the execution of Lady Salisbury had died down, decided to be rid of her grandson. However he died, there were now at least three children buried in the Tower; for all we know, Henry Pole's bones may lie there still.

More than sixty years passed. Henry Pole was forgotten, but the tale of the Princes became an established part of Tudor folklore. The Tudor dynasty ended with the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, to be replaced by the Scottish Stuarts in the person of James VI and I, great-grandson of Henry VII's daughter Margaret.

Between 1603 and 1614, during the time that Sir Walter Raleigh and Lord Grey de Wilton were prisoners in the Tower, a man called John or Jonathan Webb found, in an underground pipe or tunnel within the Tower, what were thought to be the bones of the Princes. However, it was quickly established that the bones were those of an ape from the Tower menagerie, who had somehow climbed into the tunnel, become trapped there, and perished.

The French chronicler Molinet had stated in the late fifteenth century that the Princes had been walled up in a secret chamber within the Tower and left there to starve to death. A statement made by a Mr Johnson and preserved in Volume LXXXIV of
Archaeologia,
records not only the finding of the bones of the ape but also the discovery in 1647 of the skeletons of two children, aged about six and eight and thought to be male, in a small room 7 or 8 feet square, which was found behind a wall in the passageway of the King's Lodging in the royal apartments of the Tower. The room had been sealed and the children apparently left there to perish. Those present when the discovery was made assumed that the bones were those of the Princes, although the estimated ages of the children appears to make this unlikely. Unfortunately there is no way of proving or disproving the theory because there is no further mention of these bones in the records.

During the 1650s Oliver Cromwell ordered that the old mediaeval royal apartments to the south of the White Tower be demolished. The job, however, was only half completed at his death, and the ruins stood undisturbed until 1674, when Charles II decided to have the site cleared 'of all contiguous buildings'.

In an upper storey of the White Tower may be found the Chapel of St John the Evangelist, one of the most perfectly preserved examples of Norman architecture in existence. It was a favourite place of worship of the mediaeval kings of England, who had their own private means of access to it by way of an external castellated turret on the left hand corner of the White Tower, facing the river. This turret, estimated to have been about 20 feet square and to have stood at two-thirds of the height of the keep, housed a stairway, lit by two lancet windows, which led up to a door 14 feet above ground level; this is the door through which visitors to the White Tower enter today. The door used to open on to a landing from which arose a spiral staircase leading to the chapel; today, this staircase is walled up. In 1674 this turret or 'fore-building' was crumbling, and the workmen engaged by Charles II demolished it. Then they began to dismantle the staircase, the foundations of which went very deep.

On 17th July, 1674, just as this task was nearing completion, the workmen made an astonishing find. The contemporary accounts of what they discovered are not as precise as we could wish, but they make it clear that whilst digging at the base of the staircase, or in or near its foundations, the workmen came upon a wooden chest at a depth of 10 feet below the ground. Inside the chest were the skeletons of two children: the taller child lay on its back, the smaller face down on top of it.

It was immediately assumed that these were the bodies of the Princes in the Tower. An anonymous eyewitness wrote: 'This day I, standing by the opening, 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.' They were, he adds, 'fully recognised to be the bones of those two Princes'. Twenty years later, the 1695 edition of Camden's
Britannia
carried the note that the bodies of the Princes, 'though some have written they were put into a leaden coffin and cast into the Black Deeps by the Thames Mouth by Sir Robert Brackenbury's priest, were found on July 17, 1674, by some workmen who were employed to take up the steps leading to the Chapel of the White Tower, which in all probability was the first and only place they were deposited in'.

The discovery provided the most compelling corroboration of Sir Thomas More's account of the Princes' first burial: the bones had been found exactly where he had described, 'at the stair foot, meetly deep under the ground, under a great heap of stones'. Of course, there would have been a degree of subsidence of the ground over a period of 200 years, and it is not likely that the chest was originally buried as deep as 10 feet below the surface. Nevertheless, the common practice of mediaeval stonemasons was to fill in the hollow beneath a staircase with stones and rubble. This place of burial was probably chosen because of the privacy of the turret enclosing the stairs, which was a private way for the monarch's use. Tyrell's assistants had apparently dug a hole in the ground and then made a recess inward into the foundations of the staircase.

If these skeletons were not those of the Princes, then their discovery in this particular place was an astonishing coincidence. In the light of later forensic evidence it has been claimed by several revisionists that these bones could have belonged to any historical period: in the 1970s it was suggested that they could even have been Roman, given the Tower's long history. This cannot be so. The bones were discovered with 'pieces of rag and velvet about them'. According to information given to the author by a textile expert contacted through the Archaeological Resource Centre in York, velvet was invented in the 1400s in Renaissance Italy, and was not made in England before the sixteenth century. In the 1480s the wearing of imported velvets was restricted to persons of the highest rank, not only because it was so expensive but also because of the social conventions then prevailing. Even in the seventeenth century, velvet was a costly material available only to the well-to-do. The children whose bones were found in 1674 must therefore have been well-born and must have died in the fifteenth century at the earliest. They could not have been Roman because no material resembling velvet existed at that time. As no other pair of well-born children had disappeared in the Tower during the previous 200 years, it is a fair assumption -- forensic evidence aside -- that these were indeed the bones of the Princes.

The eyewitness who saw the bones unearthed says that on that day 'they were carefully put aside in a stone coffin or coffer'. It is thought that they had been damaged to some extent by the tools used by the workmen during their exhumation. Then it seems they were left alongside a pile of builders' rubbish on the site for a time, whilst news of their discovery was sent to King Charles II. It also appears that several people removed some of the bones as souvenirs at this time, and replaced them with animal bones from the rubbish heap.

Eventually, the King ordered that the skeletons be examined by the royal surgeon and a panel of experienced antiquaries, all of whom declared they were satisfied that the remains were indeed those of the Princes. According to Camden's
Britannia
(1695 edition), the bones remained in the Tower for four years, except for some few that were secured as curiosities by Elias Ashmole and sent to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. In 1678 Charles II asked Sir Christopher Wren 'to provide a white marble coffin for the supposed bodies of the two Princes'. The bones were translated from the Tower to Westminster Abbey and decently interred, according to Camden, 'under a curious altar of black and white marble' which may still be seen today, bearing the inscription:

Here lie interred the remains of Edward V, King of England, and Richard, Duke of York, whose long desired and much sought after bones, after above an hundred and ninety years, were found by most certain tokens, deep interred under the rubbish of the stairs that led up to the Chapel of the White Tower, on the 17th of July in the year of our Lord 1674. Charles the Second, a most merciful prince, having compassion upon their hard fortune, performed the funeral rites of these unhappy Princes among the tombs of their ancestors, anno Domini 1678.

It is not known what the 'most certain tokens' that facilitated the identification of their bodies were, only that they were accepted as sufficiently convincing by those most qualified to judge at the time.

Those bones that had been sent to the Ashmolean Museum were recorded in a seventeenth-century catalogue of the museum's treasures. But in 1728, when the celebrated antiquarian Thomas Hearne went there and asked to see the bones, the keeper, Mr Whiteside, could not find them. All he could say was that he had seen them and remembered them as being 'very small, particularly the finger bones'. In 1933 a search was made in the museum for the bones, but they were not found.

During the first part of the twentieth century, strong pressure was brought to bear upon the authorities of Westminster Abbey to have the urn containing the supposed bones of the Princes opened and its contents re-examined in the light of new advances in medical science. The Abbey was -- and still is -- a Royal Peculiar, which means that both the Sovereign and the Home Secretary have to give permission for any of the tombs to be opened. In 1933, George V, bowing to public opinion, finally authorised the opening of the urn, and an examination of the bones therein was carried out in the Abbey precincts by Dr Lawrence E. Tanner, an eminent physician, archivist and Keeper of the Monuments at Westminster Abbey, and Professor W. Wright, a dental surgeon who was President of the Anatomical Society of Great Britain. Tanner's report on their findings was published in
Archaeologia
in 1934.

Tanner and Wright found, to begin with, that the urn contained all kinds of bones including animal bones which probably came from the rubbish heap on the excavation site at the Tower. Once the human bones were separated from these, Tanner and Wright discovered they had the incomplete skeletons of two children, the elder 4 foot 10 inches tall, and the younger 4 foot 6V2 inches tall; both were of slender build with very small finger bones. Using dental evidence, they estimated that the elder child was twelve to thirteen years old (Edward V had been twelve years and ten months in September 1483) and the younger nine to eleven years old (York was ten in September 1483). Because the bones were pre-pubertal their sex could not be established. Nor could the age of the bones.