So I don't know if many people have heard about this, but Philippa Langley has released a new documentary and book that claims that the Princes in the Tower (Edward and Richard, the sons of King Edward IV) were not murdered by Richard III, as the traditional narrative goes. Instead, her claim, backed with some evidence, is that the two Yorkist pretenders that attacked England during the reign of Henry VII were in fact the two princes.
I can't get into all of the details behind this (because I'd be here forever), but after sitting on this for a little while, I feel like this isn't as conclusive as Langley perhaps wants it to be. She makes various assumptions that I don't think you can explain away that easily:
- That Margaret of York and her stepson-in-law Emperor Maximilian wouldn't spend massive amounts of money and resources on people pretending to be the two princes, and therefore they must have been genuine;
- That Irish Yorkists and Europeans attended Edward's coronation in Ireland en masse, and therefore it had to be Edward IV's son and not his nephew (also named Edward) or some guy named Lambert Simnel;
- That Henry VII treated "Perkin Warbeck" (alleged to be Prince Richard) like a nobleman because he really was Richard;
While I do think the evidence is pretty fucking cool, I think you could still draw the conclusion that Margaret of York told Perkin Warbeck to write a "witness statement" (since they never prove that it was written by Richard, only that it was written at the time), that the Emperor wanted a friendly monarch in London and went along with it, that Lambert Simnel really was either Edward IV's nephew or someone pretending to be him, and that Henry VII didn't know whether Perkin Warbeck was really Richard or a fake (which was also stated in the documentary and subsequently ignored) and therefore might have just erred on the side of caution.
In my opinion, this isn't conclusive or "beyond a reasonable doubt". There is reasonable doubt, and this needs to be peer reviewed by other independent historians. Also, I don't have anything against Langley in particular (she did find Richard III's body under a car park in Leicester), but I think publishing this as "conclusive" may have been premature.
#History #PhilippaLangley #RichardIII #PrincesInTheTower #Documentary #MedievalHistory #MedievalEngland #HenryVII #MargaretOfYork
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