Prince in the Tower
The Princes in the Tower of London were Edward V of England (* 1470 , † 1483 ?) And Richard of Shrewsbury, 1st Duke of York (* 1473 , † 1483 ?), The sons of Edward IV. , And Elizabeth Woodville , the had been declared illegitimate by the Act of Parliament Titulus Regius .
Your uncle Richard III. took them to the Tower of London (both a palace and a prison) in 1483 . They were last seen there alive in the summer of 1483. After that, their trail is lost and it is widely believed that they were murdered.
Suspects
There are several suspects benefited from the disappearance and death of the young princes, including:
- Richard III had excluded the prince from the line of succession, nevertheless they remained a danger to his rule. At the end of 1483 there was a rumor about the death of the boys. These assumptions were reinforced by the fact that Richard did not immediately invalidate them by a public appearance by the princes. Richard's decision not to open an investigation into the disappearance of the princes fueled further speculation about his perpetrators. Modern historians like David Starkey, Michael Hicks, and Alison Weir consider Richard III. for the most likely culprit .
- Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham , was Richard's right-hand man and had gained personal advantages from the new king. Many see Stafford as the culprit; his execution after his rebellion against Richard in 1483 shows that he and the king had fallen out. It is unknown whether the rift was caused by the removal of the princes in the Tower. Descended from previous kings, Stafford was the next member of the House of Lancaster to claim the throne in the line of Henry Tudor. If Stafford was the culprit, the princes died in 1483.
- King Henry VII married the eldest sister of the princes, Elizabeth of York , to strengthen his claim to the throne. Elizabeth's claim to the throne depended on the fact that her two brothers were dead. However, Henry VII would not have had the opportunity to personally kill the princes in the Tower until 1485 after he had ascended to the throne, as he had previously been in exile in France for 14 years. In this case it remains unclear why the princes never appeared between the summer of 1483 and 1485, unless one takes into account a contract killing that was initiated during Heinrich's exile .
Circumstantial evidence
The Historia Croylandensis , Dominic Mancini and Philippe de Commynes report that there was a rumor of the prince's death as early as the end of 1483. In his summary of the events of 1483, Commynes states that Richard was responsible for the murder of the prince. However, he was present at the meeting of the Estates General of France in January 1484 when this rumor surfaced. The other two sources do not give any person responsible. Only Mancini's contribution, written in 1483, is really timely; the other two were written 3 to 7 years later. The Great Chronicle , written thirty years after the London City Records, testifies that rumors of the princes' deaths did not begin to circulate until after Easter 1484. Historians, on the basis of these contemporary records, speculated that the rumor of the murder of the prince in England was spread as a kind of excuse for Henry Tudor and Stafford's attempt to take the throne. If the princes were not dead by the end of 1483, any possibility that Stafford († November 2, 1483) murdered the prince will be nullified.
No discussion of this episode would be complete without the statement of Sir James Tyrell, the loyal servant of Richard III, whose "confession" to murdering the princes was always very implausible. It is cited by Tudor sources (which must of course be treated with caution), which state that the 1502 confession was made under torture . A torture confession would no longer be considered credible these days, nor did Tyrell know where the princes' bodies were.
In 1674, when the tower was being rebuilt near the White Tower , some workers excavated a box containing the skeletons of two children. They threw it on a mountain of rubbish. A few days or weeks later the suspicion arose that it might be the bones of the two princes. The bones were then picked up and some of them placed in an urn, which Charles II ordered to be buried in Westminster Abbey . In 1933 the bones were dug up, examined and then buried again in the urn. The human remains were in a relatively poor condition from the previous excavation and mixed with various animal bones. Many bones were missing so that it was not possible to determine the sex of the skeletons, but if it were those of the princes then they must have died before the Battle of Bosworth . One skeleton was larger than the other, and many bones were missing, part of the lower jaw from the smaller one and teeth from the larger one. The children from whom the skeletons originate were 12 to 13 respectively at the time of death. 10 years old, which, in the case of the two princes, indicates a death time in mid-1483 (Prince Edward was born in 1470 and his brother in 1473). A DNA analysis , if it is still possible at all, has not yet been carried out.
Reasons for the banishment of the princes from the throne
A few puzzles still surround Parliament's decision that Edward and his brother Richard were not legitimate heirs to the throne because their parents' marriage was invalid.
For the purposes of the law, the marriage was invalid if there was an older marriage contract between her father (the king) and Lady Eleanor Talbot . A prenuptial agreement was a promise of marriage that would have made marriage to Elizabeth Woodville illegal. Getting married in secret was an admission that there were legal obstacles. So if evidence was presented to Parliament that Edward was bound to Eleanor Talbot by a prenuptial agreement, the marriage to Elizabeth Woodville would have to be declared bigamy and the children resulting from that marriage declared illegitimate.
The fact that the princes were bastards didn't mean they couldn't inherit. William the Conqueror was neither the first nor the last bastard to inherit lands and titles. Illegitimacy was a legal status that could be changed by law, either through church or state law. Parliament could have legitimized the princes and allowed Edward V to remain king. 'Child kings', like Henry III. , Richard II. And Heinrich VI. , always meant catastrophes for England, and the War of the Roses was only stopped by Edward IV as an adult king.
Fiction
- Josephine Tey , alibi for a king . Dtv, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-423-25169-7 . Original title: The Daughter of Time (first edition London 1951). Detective novel, awarded the Grand prix de littérature policière .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ The Society - History. Richardiii.net, November 30, 2006, accessed July 14, 2018 .
- ↑ Michael Hicks: Richard III. (2003) ISBN 978-0-7524-2589-4
- ^ Alison Weir: The Princes in the Tower (1992) ISBN 978-0-345-39178-0