Richard the 3rd

 "If she bad worn another kind of headdress no one would ever have bothered about her. It's that cap that seduces people." "You think she would have loved less greatly in a sunbonnet?" "She never loved greatly at all, in any kind of bon-net." Marta looked as scandalised as a lifetime in the thea-tre and an hour of careful make-up allowed her to. "Why do you think that?" "Mary Stuart was six feet tall. Nearly all out-size women are sexually cold. Ask any doctor." And as he said it he wondered why, in all the years since Marta had first adopted him as a spare escort when she needed one it had not occurred to him to wonder whether her notorious level-headedness about men had something to do with her inches. But Marta had not drawn any parallels; her mind was still on her favourite queen. "At least she was a martyr. You'll have to allow her that." "Martyr to what?" "Her religion." "The only thing she was a martyr to was rheumatism. She married Darnley without the Pope's dispensation, and Bothwell by Protestant rites." "In a moment you'll be telling me she wasn't a prisoner!" "The trouble with you is that you think of her in a little room at the top of a castle, with bars on the windows and a faithful old attendant to share her prayers with her. In actual fact she had a personal household of sixty persons. She complained bitterly when it was reduced to a beggarly thirty, and nearly died of chagrin when it was reduced to two male secretaries, several women, an embroiderer, and a cook or two. And Elizabeth had to pay for all that out of her own purse. For twenty years she paid, and for twenty years Mary Stuart hawked the crown of Scot-land round Europe to anyone who would start a revolution and put her back on the throne that she had lost; or, alternatively, on the one Elizabeth was sitting on." He looked at Marta and found that she was smiling. "Are they a little better now?" she asked. "Are what better?" "The prickles." He laughed. "Yes. For a whole minute I had forgotten about them. That is at least one good thing to put down to Mary Stuart's account!" "How do you know so much about Mary?" "I did an essay about her in my last year at school." "And didn't like her, I take it." "Didn't like what I found out about her." "You don't think her tragic, then." "Oh, yes, very. But not tragic in any of the ways that popular belief makes her tragic. Her tragedy was that she was born a queen with the outlook of a subur-ban housewife. Scoring off Mrs. Tudor in the next street is harmless and amusing; it may lead you into unwarrantable indulgence in hire-purchase, but it af-fects only yourself. When you use the same technique on kingdoms the result is disastrous. If you are willing to put a country of ten million people in pawn in order to score off a royal rival, then you end by being a friendless failure." He lay thinking about it for a little. "She would have been a wild success as a mistress at a girl's school." "Beast!"
and
He pushed the portrait at her. What did she think of it? If that man were her patient what would be her verdict? "Liver," she said crisply, and bore away the tray in heel-tapping protest, all starch and blond curls. But the surgeon strolling in against her draught, kindly and casual, had other views. He looked at the portrait, as invited, and said after a moment's scrutiny: "Poliomyelitis." "Infantile paralysis?" Grant said; and remembered all of a sudden that Richard III had a withered arm. "Who is it?" the surgeon asked. "Richard the Third." "Really? That's interesting." "Did you know that he had a withered arm?" "Had he? I didn't remember that. I thought he was a hunchback." "So he was." "What I do remember is that he was born with a full set of teeth and ate live frogs. Well, my diagnosis seems to be abnormally accurate." "Uncanny. What made you choose polio?" "I don't quite know, now that you ask me to be definitive. Just the look of the face, I suppose. It's the look one sees on the face of a crippled child. If he was born hunchbacked that probably accounts for it and not polio. I notice the artist has left out the hump." "Yes. Court painters have to have a modicum of tact. It wasn't until Cromwell that sitters asked for `warts and all.' " "If you ask me," the surgeon said, absent-mindedly considering the splint on Grant's leg, "Cromwell started that inverted snobbery from which we are all suffering today. 'I'm a plain man, I am; no nonsense about me.' And no manners, grace, or generosity.
and
 A serious rebellion followed, which Richard put down with great ferocity. In order to recover some of his lost popularity he held a Parliament, which passed useful statutes against Benevolences, Mainte-nance, and Livery. But a second rebellion followed. This took the form of an invasion, with French troops, by the head of the Lancaster branch, Henry Tudor. He encoun-tered Richard at Bosworth, near Leicester, where the treachery of the Stanleys gave the day to Henry. Rich-ard was killed in battle, fighting courageously, leaving behind him a name hardly less infamous than that of John.
What on earth were Benevolences, Maintenance, and Livery? And how did the English like having the succes-sion decided for them by French troops? But, of course, in the days of the Roses, France was still a sort of semi-detached part of England; a coun-try much less foreign to an Englishman than Ireland was. A fifteenth-century Englishman went to France as a matter of course; but to Ireland only under pro-test. He lay and thought about that England. The Eng-land over which the Wars of the Roses had been fought. A green, green England; with not a chimney-stack from Cumberland to Cornwall. An England still unhedged, with great forests alive with game, and wide marshes thick with wild-fowl. An England with the same small group of dwellings repeated every few miles in endless permutation: castle, church, and cottages; monastery, church, and cottages; manor, church, and cottages. The strips of cultivation round the cluster, of dwellings, and beyond that the green-ness. The unbroken greenness. The deep-rutted lanes that ran from group to group, mired to bog in the winter and white with dust in the summer; decorated with wild roses or red with hawthorn as the seasons came and went. For thirty years, over this green uncrowded land, the Wars of the Roses had been fought. But it had been more of a blood feud than a war. A Montague and Capulet affair; of no great concern to the average Englishman. No one pushed in at your door to demand whether you were York or Lancaster and to hale you off to a concentration camp if your answer proved to be the wrong one for the occasion. It was a small concentrated war; almost a private party. They fought a battle in your lower meadow, and turned your kitchen into a dressing-station, and then moved off somewhere or other to fight a battle somewhere else, and a few weeks later you would hear what had happened at that battle, and you would have a family row about the result because your wife was probably Lancaster and you were perhaps York, and it was all rather like following rival football teams. No one persecuted you for being a Lancastrian or a Yorkist, any more than you would be persecuted for being an Arsenal fan or a Chelsea follower.
and
But at least he had the satisfaction of learning that the Englishman of the fifteenth century ‘drank water only as a penance’. The English labourer of Richard III’s day was, it seemed, the admiration of the continent. Mr Tanner quoted a contemporary, writing in France.
The King of France will allow no one to use salt, but what is bought of himself at his own arbitrary price. The troops pay for nothing, and treat the people barbarously if they are not satisfied. All growers of vines must give a fourth to the King. All the towns must pay the King great yearly sums for his men-at-arms. The peasants live in great hardship and misery. They wear no woollen. Their clothing consists of little short jerkins of sackcloth, no trowse but from the knees up, and legs exposed and naked. The women all go barefoot. The people eat no meat, except the fat of bacon in their soup. Nor are the gentry much better off. If an accusation is brought against them they are examined in private, and perhaps never more heard of.
In England it is very different. No one can abide in another man’s house without his leave. The King cannot put on taxes, nor alter the laws, nor make new ones. The English never drink water except for penance. They eat all sorts of flesh and fish. They are clothed throughout in good woollens, and are provided with all sorts of household goods. An Englishman cannot be sued except before the ordinary judge.
And it seemed to Grant that if you were very hard up and wanted to go to see what your Lizzie’s first-born looked like it must have been reassuring to know that there was shelter and a hand-out at every religious house, instead of wondering how you were going to raise the train fare. That green England he had fallen asleep with last night had a lot to be said for it.
and
‘About the murder the murder of those two boys — isn’t it odd that no one talks of it?’
‘How do you mean: no one talks of it?’
‘These last three days I’ve been going through contemporary papers: letters and what not. And no one mentions them at all.’
‘Perhaps they were afraid to. It was a time when it paid to be discreet.’
‘Yes: but I’ll tell you something even odder. You know that Henry brought a Bill of Attainder against Richard, after Bosworth. Before Parliament. I mean. Well, he accuses Richard of cruelty and tyranny but doesn’t even mention the murder.’
‘What!’ said Grant, startled.
‘Yes, you may look startled.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Quite sure.’
‘But Henry got possession of the Tower immediately on his arrival in London after Bosworth. If the boys were missing it is incredible that he should not publish the fact immediately. It was the trump card in his hand.’ He lay in surprised silence for a little, The sparrows on the window-sill quarrelled loudly. ‘I can’t make sense of it.’ he said. ‘What possible explanation can there be for his omission to make capital out of the fact that the boys were missing?’
Brent shifted his long legs to a more comfortable position. ‘There is only one explanation,’ he said. ‘And that is that the boys weren’t missing.’
There was a still longer silence this time, while they stared at each other.
‘Oh, no, it’s nonsense,’ Grant said. ‘There must be some obvious explanation that we are failing to see.’
‘As what, for instance?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t had time to think.’
‘I’ve had nearly three days to think, and I still haven’t thought up a reason that will fit. Nothing will fit the facts except the conclusion that the boys were alive when Henry took over the Tower. It was a completely unscrupulous Act of Attainder; it accused Richard’s followers — the loyal followers of an anointed King fighting against an invader — of treason. Every accusation that Henry could possibly make with any hope of getting away with it was put into that Bill. And the very worst he could accuse Richard of was the usual cruelty and tyranny. The boys aren’t even mentioned.’
and
‘On the 20th he went with a small body of retainers to the Tower — did you know that the Tower was the royal residence in London, and not a prison at all?’
‘Yes, I knew that. It got its prison meaning only because nowadays being sent to the Tower has one meaning only. And of course because, being the royal castle in London, and the only strong keep, offenders were sent there for safe keeping in the days before we had His Majesty’s Prisons. What did Richard go to the Tower for?’
‘He went to interrupt a meeting of the conspirators, and arrested Lord Hastings, Lord Stanley, and one John Morton, Bishop of Ely.’
‘I thought we would arrive at John Morton sooner or later!’
‘A proclamation was issued, giving details of the plot to murder Richard, but apparently no copy now exists. Only one of the conspirators was beheaded, and that one, oddly enough, seems to have been an old friend of both Edward and Richard. Lord Hastings.’
‘Yes, according to the sainted More he was rushed down to the courtyard and beheaded on the nearest log.’
‘Rushed nothing,’ said Carradine disgustedly. ‘He was beheaded a week later. There’s a contemporary letter about it that gives the date. Moreover, Richard couldn’t have done it out of sheer vindictiveness, because he granted Hastings’ forfeited estates to his widow, and restored the children’s right of succession to them — which they had automatically lost.’
‘No, the death of Hastings must have been inevitable,’ said Grant, who was thumbing through More’s Richard III. ‘Even the sainted More says: “Undoubtedly the Protector loved him well, and was loth to have lost him”. What happened to Stanley and to John Morton?’
‘Stanley was pardoned — What are you groaning about?’
‘Poor Richard. That was his death warrant.’
‘Death warrant? How could pardoning Stanley be his death warrant?’
‘Because it was Stanley’s sudden decision to go over to the other side that lost Richard the battle of Bosworth.’
‘You don’t say.’
‘Odd to think that if Richard had seen to it that Stanley went to the block like his much-loved Hastings he would have won the battle of Bosworth, there would never have been any Tudors, and the hunchbacked monster that appears in Tudor tradition would never have been invented. On his previous showing he would probably have had the best and most enlightened reign in history. What was done to Morton?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Another mistake.’
‘Or at least nothing to signify. He was put into gentlemanly detention under the care of Buckingham. The people who did go to the block were the heads of the conspiracy that Richard had arrested at Northampton: Rivers and Co.
and
He got rid of the lot.’
‘And Richard’s son? John? The bastard one.’
‘Henry VII granted him a pension of £20 a year, but he was the first of the lot to go.’
‘On what charge?’
‘On having been suspected of receiving an invitation to go to Ireland.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘I’m not. Ireland was the focus of loyalist rebellion. The York family were very popular in Ireland, and to get an invitation from that direction was as good as a death warrant in Henry’s eyes. Though I can’t think why even Henry would have bothered about young John. “An active, well-disposed boy”, he was, by the way, according to the “Foedera”.’
‘His claim was better than Henry’s.’ Grant said, very tart. ‘He was the illegitimate only son of a King. Henry was the great-grandson of an illegitimate son of a younger son of a King.’
There was silence for some time.
Then Carradine, out of the silence, said: ‘Yes.’
‘Yes to what?’
‘To what you are thinking.’
‘It does look like it, doesn’t it. They’re the only two who are missing from the list.’
There was another silence.
‘They were all judicial murders,’ Grant said presently. ‘Murders under the form of law. But you can’t bring a capital charge against a pair of children.’
‘No,’ agreed Carradine, and went on watching the sparrows. ‘No, it would have to be done some other way. After all, they were the important ones.’

Josephine Tey is persuasive but conversely, an online post convincingly states:
Under Charles II, renovations of the tower turned up two children's skeletons in the precise location that More said the princes' bodies were dumped. The skeletons were prepubescent -- too young to determine whether they were male or female (the last exhumation was conducted in the 1930s, before DNA testing). They were also dressed in velvet.

Alison Weir has pointed out that velvet was unknown in England prior to Edward IV's reign. So the bodies had to be dumped there after that time. There were only two pre-pubescents during that period who were in the Tower but never were found -- the princes. In addition, More's account mentioned that the two princes wrapped themselves in velvet blankets just before they were murdered.

Henry VII also had no motive to kill the princes. He reigned by right of conquest, not of blood. If the princes lived, it would not have invalidated his rule. In addition, Henry came to power two years after the princes were last seen alive. In that time, Edward would have aged from 12 to 14 -- in other words, he would have reached puberty and at least one of the two corpses could have been identified as male. So they couldn't have been killed under Henry's reign.

In addition, Richard stopped paying the princes' jailer in July of 1483, a good sign that there was no one alive to jail. And the princes were sighted during the early months of their captivity, but never after August of 1483.