The Princes in the Tower

 

I am so incredibly grateful for people like Philippa Langley. Thanks to her tenacity and hard work, we've found and reburied Richard III with dignity, something I never thought I would see. And for the last 8 years, she's been working with teams of researchers all over the world to find documentation to show that Edward, Prince of Wales, and Richard, Duke of York, the two young sons of King Edward IV, were not murdered by Richard III. She's found some very interesting documents, especially in the Netherlands, that tends to point to the two so-called pretenders were actually Edward and Richard. The evil usurper, Henry Tudor, did everything he could to villainize Richard, destroying as many original documents as he could that pointed to the fact that he was lawfully crowned. He also did the same with any evidence that the boys were taken out of England for their own safety. 

Henry really put himself in a bind when he overturned the bastardization of Edward IV's children with Elizabeth Woodville in order to marry Edward's eldest daughter, Elizabeth. Doing that made her a lawful Princess again, but it also made her younger brothers lawful Princes with a better claim to the throne than he ever had. No contemporary surviving evidence from the time before Henry took the throne suggests Richard had his nephews murdered, it was only after Tudor came along that the rumors started. Many people who knew the boys as children attested to them being the real deal and Henry suppressed it. By 1499, both the boys were most likely dead, killed as pretenders. 

History is often rewritten by the victors, and nowhere is that more evident than in the Tudor dynasty, where everything possible was done to erase the good works of Richard III and the legitimacy of those young men. I love to imagine a world in which Henry did not defeat Richard at Bosworth and the world was never subjected to Henry VIII. I would at least love to see Richard's good name cleared and Langley is doing her best to get us there. This was a terrific start. I can't wait to see what else she and her teams are able to uncover.