Secrets of the Dead: "The Princes in the Tower" (Briarhawk Productions, WNET, PBS, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched a Secrets of the Dead episode on PBS that I was eagerly looking forward to because it was based on an historical mystery I’ve been fascinated by since I first read Josephine Tey’s 1951 novel The Daughter of Time in the 1970’s. The episode was called “The Princes in the Tower” and was based on the still-controversial attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of Richard III, the last King of England from the York dynasty, who took the throne in 1483 after his nephews, King Edward V and Richard, Duke of York, were declared illegitimate and therefore ineligible to reign. Richard ruled for two years until the Earl of Richmond led an invasion force from France to England and defeated and killed Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. The common history is that Richard III literally murdered his way to the throne; he kidnapped the princes, locked them in the Tower of London (actually a fortress rather than a prison, though it had a wing called the “Bloody Tower” where people under a death sentence were held until they could be executed) and sent a professional assassin, Sir James Tyrrell, to kill them. That was the version that got told by the greatest playwright of all time, William Shakespeare, in his Richard III play, written in 1595, while the last monarch of the Tudor dynasty founded by the Earl of Richmond (who took the English throne as Henry VII), Queen Elizabeth I, was still alive and in power. But almost as soon as Elizabeth died in 1603 and the Scottish House of Stuart, in the person of James VI of Scotland (who became James I of England), took over, historians – most notably Sir Horace Walpole (1717-1797) – started challenging this consensus view.

I’m not sure how Josephine Tey (whose real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh and who wrote mystery novels as “Josephine Tey” and plays as “Gordon Daviot”) got interested in rehabilitating Richard III, but in 1934 she wrote a play called Dickon that presented Richard III as a sympathetic character and in 1951 she wrote The Daughter of Time. The novel dealt with Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant, who’s laid up in the hospital from injuries sustained on the job and is inspired to re-investigate the case of Richard III with the help of an American researcher who becomes his leg man, looking up documents in the British Museum and elsewhere. Ultimately Grant decides that not only did Richard III not have his nephews killed, but when Henry VII took the throne “they were still alive and their whereabouts known.” The Secrets of the Dead episode “The Princes in the Tower” featured two modern researchers, Philippa Langley – an amateur historian who deduced the location of Richard III’s remains – and Rob Rinder, a barrister (a British criminal lawyer) whom Langley engaged to review the evidence and pass his professional judgment as to whether or not it was credible. They mount a merry chase throughout Europe and meet with, among other people, Nathalie Minjun and Zoë Maula of something called the Dutch Research Group and German history professor Henrike Lahnemann from the Saxon Institute of Medieval Studies in Dresden. Along the way Langley uncovers four documents: an alleged autobiographical sketch by Richard, Duke of York telling how he escaped England and fled to France, stopped at various European capitals and ultimately led an attempt to reconquer England; receipts from both Edward V and Richard, Duke of York for money advanced to them for the reconquest by Maximilian IV, Holy Roman Emperor of the day and relative of Margaret of Burgundy, the two princes’ aunt and Edward IV’s and Richard III’s sister; and an account of a big coronation ceremony for Richard, Duke of York at Christchurch Cathedral in Dublin.

The conclusion Langley reaches – and Rinder eventually endorses – is that the princes from the Tower were actually killed in unsuccessful invasions, Edward V at Stoke in 1487 (in an invasion hamstrung by tactical and linguistic differences between the German, French and Irish soldiers in Edward’s army and in particular by the Irish fighters’ refusal to wear armor, which made them sitting ducks for Henry’s British archers) and Richard, Duke of York in Cornwall 10 years later. Both unsuccessful invasions were attributed by Tudor historians to pretenders who weren’t really the princes in the Tower: the Battle of Stoke to a 10-year-old named Lambert Simnel whom Henry VII put to work in the royal kitchen after the battle was lost; and the rebellion at Cornwall to Perkin Warbeck, an alleged pretender just posing as Richard, Duke of York. Though Henry VII was notoriously bloodthirsty when dealing with pretenders to his throne, he went relatively easy on both Simnel and Warbeck; when he lost the battle in Cornwall Warbeck was given an apartment in the king’s walk-in closet and allowed to come and go around the palace grounds pretty much as he pleased. It was only when he tried to escape and was recaptured that Warbeck was put in a dungeon, shackled and bound, and ultimately executed. The Secrets of the Dead episode ends with Rob Rinder basically convinced that Philippa Langley has made her case that Richard III was innocent of having had his nephews killed. Even the one document whose authenticity he had questioned, Richard, Duke of York’s alleged autobiography, he came around to after two medieval historians he showed scanned copies to concurred that it was for real. This episode was certainly of interest to me given the quality of Tey’s novel and the eloquence with which she, relying on completely different historical evidence from what Philippa Langley and Rob Rinder were using, made the case for Richard III’s innocence in the context of a modern-day (well, 1951 modern-day, anyway) mystery novel and also her confirmation of the old case that “history is written by the winners” and George Orwell’s contention, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”