Royal Blood

 

This, ladies and gentleman, is the book that started it all for me in regards to King Richard III. This was the first one I read, and just finished rereading, twenty years after reading it the first time.

I love historical mysteries and unsolved true crime. As a teenager, I was fascinated by the Lizzie Borden case, the Lindbergh kidnapping, Jack the Ripper, the Black Dahlia, and so many others. I ripped through the true crime section at the library, reading everything I could get my hands on. Somehow I managed to stumble across this book when it was first published. I'm glad I did! Not sure how I managed it--that time period in history wasn't of interest to me yet (it would be a few more years before I would devour everything I could read about the Tudors). Fields looks at the evidence surrounding the disappearance and perhaps murder of Edward IV's young sons, Edward and Richard, who were last seen sometime in 1483 in the Tower, after their uncle Richard became King. No one knows what really happened to them, if they were murdered or spirited away. If they were murdered, who did it? Richard certainly had a motive, but if he did murder them, he made a clumsy botch of it by not displaying the bodies in order to quell potential rebellions and pretenders, something Henry VII had to deal with. Others had a much better (in my opinion) motive, like Henry Tudor himself (stay with me for a minute, I promise I'll make it as simple as I can, because it really is complicated). Richard had the children of his brother Edward and Elizabeth Woodville declared illegitimate after learning his brother was precontracted in marriage to another woman before marrying Elizabeth. He takes the throne. Now, Henry's troops defeat him at Bosworth and Henry takes the crown and marries Princess Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of Edward and Elizabeth. But wait! She's illegitimate. So Henry has to reverse that--but if he does, then not only is she no longer illegitimate, her brothers benefit as well. Now Edward, if alive, is truly the rightful King. If Edward is dead, then Prince Richard becomes King Richard IV. So who benefited most from the boys being dead? Richard III, who already held the crown by right after the Council declared the Princes illegitimate, or Henry VII, who had no rightful blood claim to the throne and was married to the illegitimate daughter of Edward IV? It's easy to see that Richard had no cause to kill those boys and most likely didn't. I doubt we'll ever really know what happened, but for folks looking for the facts plainly told, you can't beat this book.