In a time when the commissars of English wokery, those self-flagellating haters of their own country and culture, are doing their relentless best to topple English heroes through bad history, there is something charmingly forgivable about a person defending her English hero, albeit also through bad history. To whom am I referring? Phillipa Langley, the honorary president of the Richard III Society, and her paladin, Richard III (1452-1485).
Defending Richard is indeed a tall order. To many, he is Shakespeare’s eponymous villain whose turpitude is symbolised by a crooked back and a paralysed arm. He is infamous for imprisoning in the Tower of London and then ordering the suffocation of his young nephews, Edward V and Richard, in order to seize the crown after their father, Edward IV, had died. He is most certainly guilty of the summary execution of the two boys’ supporters. Earl Rivers, his nephew Richard Grey and Thomas Vaughan were beheaded at Pontefract Castle and Lord Hastings was similarly dispatched for insisting that Edward V’s coronation went ahead. Intimidated by the presence of Richard’s army and the fear of a power vacuum, the people of London petitioned Richard to be king. Thus, on 6 July 1483 was Richard crowned.
Langley has nonetheless picked up the gauntlet. She claims that she has new evidence that Richard did not order his nephews’ deaths, but that they were exiled or escaped and survived into adulthood. This evidence consists of documents found in archives on the continent that refer to the two boys as adults. It is Langley’s thesis also that the two pretenders who challenged Henry VII for the throne, Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, were Edward V and Richard respectively.
Langley is clearly very persuasive for Channel 4 chose to air her theory last Saturday night in a documentary titled The Princes in the Tower: The New Evidence. It no doubt helps her case that she was the person who correctly intuited that Richard’s skeleton was buried of all places under the car park of Leicester City Council’s Social Services, and convinced archaeologists to get digging.
The problem Langley has is that the documentary, although acknowledging that the princes’ remains may have been discovered in 1674 underneath a staircase in the Tower of London, does not convincingly refute this possibility. In 1933 the remains were temporarily disinterred from their resting place in Westminster Abbey for forensic examination and it was concluded that they were the bones of two boys of the same ages as the princes when they disappeared shortly after Richard’s accession. The best the documentary can do in response is Janina Ramirez’s swift and unconvincing dismissal of the examination as tendentiously in favour of the remains being that of the two princes.
Historiography is also against Langley. Top historians such as Michael Hicks, David Horspool, Michael Jones, Desmond Seward and Alison Weir reject Langley’s revisionism and argue that on probability, Richard eliminated his nephews in order to clear a path to the throne.
Richard also had a very good reason to dispose quickly of his nephews. As a prince, Richard was appalled at his brother Edward IV’s choice of wife, Elizabeth Woodville. She was not a noblewoman or a foreign princess, but a merchant’s daughter. With her came a large family that eagerly enjoyed the King’s generous patronage. Richard bitterly resented these avaricious upstarts, and Woodville never forgave his snobbish contempt. Now that Edward was dead, Richard may have feared that his widow would turn her son Edward V against him. At best, Richard might be exiled and at worst dragged to a traitor’s beheading. In an age when life was cheap and England’s royal families contested the throne like rival mafia families, Richard knew it was either kill or be killed. Exiling the boys would only have led to what Langley claims they did: return to England with a military force when they were older with the intention of claiming the throne.
The debate over Richard might appear to some to be merely a typhoon in a teapot, but for many it has the vexatious fascination of a detective story. It is a harmless debate too, for it concerns dark deeds that are over five hundred years old. Furthermore, it is a serious reminder to meddling progressives who love everyone’s history but their own, that England’s history means much to the English, that it needs to be taught and that the English need their heroes as much as any other nation – even if this particular hero remains a villain after all.
Peter Harris is the author of two books, The Rage Against the Light: Why Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong (2019) and Do You Believe It? A Guide to a Reasonable Christian Faith (2020).
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Forget all that, how many slaves did they have?