Okay, you’re going to have to follow my train of thought here. It’s going to be a bit of a roundabout ride. I’ve posted about my interest in The Princes and the Tower Mystery before, and multiple moments triggered my interest in that topic. In my interest in The War of the Roses, a history club in my junior year of high school hosted a murder mystery party. Even though I could not attend, the theme was the Prince in the Tower. There was also a well-made documentary about the discovery of Richard III’s remains under a parking lot in the UK, called The King in the Car Park. I remember watching the documentary, and I remember being interested in it because the narrator said this king of England was killed and was buried in a monastery. I knew there had been a civil war in England, but the only civil war I knew was in the 1600s.
Growing up, we went through the Chick-fil-A drive-through quite frequently. They would give out free cassette tapes with stories on them, and in one set, we got an abridged collection of Sherlock Holmes stories. In one of the stories, Sherlock Holmes goes on a treasure hunt and discovers a crown belonging to the English royal family, hidden during the 1600s Civil War. So when I was in high school and college, and I heard that a different king had been killed, who was not Charles I, I was very interested because I had only known that a civil war had happened in England in the 1600s, thanks to an abridged Sherlock Holmes story. So I watched the documentary and they talk about finding Richard’s remains under the parking lot, or in the UK, they call it a car park, and there’s a lady in the documentary who is crucial in getting the parking lot torn apart so that they can look where they think Richard the third has been buried and she is a member of the Richer the third society. She is Phillipa Langley.
You can tell from the documentary that she feels he has been horribly maligned by history. She hopes that by digging up his remains, they’ll discover he didn’t really have a hunchback. They do end up finding out that he had scoliosis. She’s slightly disappointed, but the documentary ends with the fact that they have done DNA testing. They end up tracking down a descendant through Richard the Third’s maternal line to compare the DNA of the remains they locate. They hire a forensic artist to create a sculpture of his face from his DNA profile, and later, he’s reburied elsewhere. So now we come to earlier this year, when Phillipa Langley claimed she had proof that the princes and the tower were removed from the Tower by Richard the Third and sent to safety. She continues by saying that they both returned later and tried to reclaim the throne of England. I listened to a whole podcast about it on BBC History Extra; it’s the December 19, 2023, episode. I was very excited because this is a mystery I have found fascinating, and it would be fantastic to finally have an answer after all these years about what happened to the princess in the tower. I go into the podcast with an open mind, and she references a specific document from a royal in Burgundy stating that weapons are being purchased for one of the dead princes. She claims that this proves that the prince survived the tower and was not killed there.
At that point, I was skeptical because in my mind, proof of life means you have DNA, you have remains, you have something concrete, as she did with Richard III. They dug him up and tracked down a descendant. They DNA tested him, and they had evidence. So, I finished the podcast and thought this didn’t sound very substantial. Still, you know it’s a topic of interest, so I bought the book she released, which was the first phase of her research project. I do not have the patience to read all 200-plus pages, but I did read enough. I concluded that there was insufficient evidence to say the princess arrived at the tower, and unfortunately, there was nothing concrete to support this assumption.
She references at the beginning of the book that a lot of people told her that Richard III had been thrown into a river you know he was not going to be found buried under the parking lot/car park and that she persisted and that you know history has to be thoroughly interrogated which is true but in the case of Richard the Third there was a skeleton that they could DNA test there was concrete evidence to back up her theory. There was nothing concrete in this case. Now, speaking of bodies, there were two bodies found in the 1600s in the Tower of London that were examined in the 1930s. They are believed to be the princes, but the bones were buried in Westminster Abbey, and the British royal family would have to give permission to exhume the remains to do DNA testing. The royal family has stated that if they start digging up those bones to DNA test them, then what if historians want to dig up other bones of other royals who are interred in Westminster Abbey that might also have dubious origins, and they just don’t want to go down that road of digging up bodies and testing remains? They just wish the remains to be left alone, which is unfortunate. A lot of historians would really love to examine the bones and test them, especially because the specificity of forensic DNA testing is obviously much better now than it was almost 100 years ago, in the 1930s.
So now we arrive at the most recent “development” in the mystery of the princes and the tower. Once again, I am drawn to a podcast by BBC History Extra. This time, it is a historian, Tim Thornton, whom I had not heard of before, who explains that he was going through the records of the people around him. I’m going to say these people were parallel or adjacent to the princes, and he discovers that a chain belonging to one of the princes showed up in the will of someone who was the sister-in-law of one of the alleged murderers of the princes. In this episode, they spend a lot of time discussing how Thomas Moore wrote an account of what happened to the princes 30 years after their disappearance, and how that account has not been viewed as accurate or trustworthy. They also spend a lot of time discussing how difficult it is to solve mysteries like this, and how little evidence is left because it was so long ago. They discuss how unusual it is for someone living in the tower, who was a royal individual, not to leave anything behind. They mentioned that no jewelry or clothing from the princes has ever been found, and nothing belonging to the princes is in the current collection at Royal Palaces.
They do an outstanding job of explaining that the closest we might ever get to the truth of what happened to the princes in the tower is the probability of what most likely happened to them and, through investigating, figuring out who is the most likely suspect/ murderer. Now, his investigative evidence suggests that it was most likely Richard and one of Richard’s trusted associates who had the princes killed. Phillipa Langley and Tim Thornton have in common that they both rely on primary sources and try to interpret them to understand what was happening at the time.
So, in the podcast I listened to earlier this year with Phillipa Langley, she discusses how they are trying to treat their investigation into the disappearances of the princes in the tower as a forensic police murder investigation, so they’re looking to go beyond a doubt and prove what happened to them. I’m going to be clear that both historians have done more research on the topic and are better versed in the nuances of what was happening in England during this era than I am. Both of them have dedicated their entire careers to this era and these topics, so this is my layperson’s opinion. I tend to agree more with Mr. Thornton that the best we will probably ever be able to do about historical mysteries this old is to find things that infer or increase the probability of one course of events happening.
Queen Elizabeth the Second was not interested in having the bones at Westminster Abbey tested, and I have a difficult time believing that any future royal would want Westminster Abbey torn apart for the sake of someone’s historical investigation, as much as I would like those bones tested. I have also wondered whether the bones were tested and came back as not the princes in the tower. Where would that leave the historical investigation? I would say most historians believe Richard the Third had his nephews killed, and others believe that they died at another’s hand, or they were ferried off to safety. What struck me about the discovery of this chain in the will of someone who was linked to one of the alleged murderers is how, in modern-day and true crime investigations, when someone is killed, and their possessions are taken, a lot of the time, tracking those possessions can be used to help solve the case. It can be an important piece of evidence.
I’m very curious about Phillipa Langley, who is still working on a research project investigating what happened to the princes in the tower, and what her take on this most recent discovery will be. A comment made by Tracy Borman, who was interviewed along with Mr. Thornton about the new discovery, I think, is worth giving some thought. She mentioned that the disappearance of the princes and the tower is a controversial topic, and that many people have a hard time keeping an open mind about the princes’ fate. This issue can be viewed on a macro level, with a general history. Many people have historical figures they want to view in a certain light, and when that perception or opinion is challenged, they feel personally attacked.
In the United States, one of the best examples I can think of is the “lost cause” mythology that emerged after the Civil War. It is still a hotly contested topic, especially in the South and the Southeast, where I am from. I have a hard time understanding why people care so much about whether or not, for example, General Robert E. Lee was a kind person to the enslaved persons he owned. People will pull out evidence on both sides of how he was nice to this one enslaved person, or he was mean to other enslaved persons, and it can get heated. When we as a culture and a society get bogged down in individuals and whether or not they are good and bad I really feel like we fail to look at the systems that were in place, the behaviors that were considered normal, and we don’t spend time thinking about, for example, you know what it must have been like to be involved in those systems and to be in a world where certain things that we consider abhorrent today we’re tolerated and considered normal.
I think it can be soothing to focus on one person and put a lot of weight on what kind of person they were. Sometimes, grappling with an individual is easier than with a system, society, or ideology. Still, we come to more significant conclusions when we zoom out and look at the bigger picture. When I think about the War of the Roses and when I try to draw lessons from what happened back then I am struck by how fleeting power was, how you could never really trust someone because they would stab you in the back, and just the terror that so many of the people must have lived in with the turmoil that was happening in the country. I also really feel for the women who often had minimal agency. I’m struck by how noblemen were tested almost primarily and exclusively on the battlefield. There are also similarities: people who can have a foot in both camps, not at the forefront of power but behind the people leading the charge, often fare better than the person at the very top.
The importance of consensus has struck me, and one reason Richard the Third lost the support of his kingdom was that he favored the Lords of the north and didn’t spread out the privileges and favors amongst the other nobility and the rest of the country. I hope that I always approach history with the goal of learning, so that I can understand the past, better understand the present, and make the future better. I’m not sure that, in no way, what happened to the princes and the tower would make me a better citizen, but I still would like to know. Stay tuned.
Living on the Spectrum 
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