Has a 500 year-old mystery finally been solved? No one has known what happened to the princes in the Tower, but a consensus has long held that Richard III probably had them bumped off. However, the woman who found the king’s remains in a car park now believes she has cleared him of murder.
Philippa Langley, who discovered the last Plantagenet king’s remains in Leicester 11 years ago, believes that the princes, Edward V and Richard, Duke of York, were not murdered and later became the so-called pretenders to the throne, Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck.
The research has been closely guarded and will be pored over by historians in the coming days and weeks. Langley’s findings are likely to delight her fellow Ricardians, but it remains to be seen whether she can convince her sceptics.
“For the last seven years, I have been investigating the story of the two princes,” Langley says in the documentary, The Princes in the Tower: The New Evidence, which she will present with Rob Rinder at 8pm on Saturday on Channel 4. “We’ve made these most startling discoveries which I believe prove what happened to the missing princes.”
Interesting.The King got the monks to write the spin in those days,didn’t he.
I think it was Simnel who got punished by just having to work in the royal kitchen.
Better than getting head chopped off.
Well, I watched the “documentary” and I was less than impressed. The producers have adopted a populist approach stressing the personality narrative/interaction and constant repetition of statements to avoid those at the back of the class missing the point. The international nature of the exercise based on, allegedly, an “army” of researchers, who discovered missing documents, is frequently indicated by the name of the European location in upper-case, just so we know where the couple are, since all the “archive” buildings look alike. I was left wondering, though, why Philippa was filmed driving down country lanes only between European locations - choice or contrivance.
Nevertheless, the documents were interesting and may yet prove astounding.
I too watched this programme last night. The trouble for me was, Philippa Langley has been on this case of the two princes for years, and comes over as quite obsessed with it. However the documents uncovered, were authenticated by experts, so that made Philippa’s case a long stronger. I just wish that the two skeletons that were found in The Tower of London, believed to be the princes, were exhumed and DNA tested. However the late Queen refused to have that done on the grounds that they should be left to rest in peace. It would have solved the murder theory once and for all.It’s a fascinating period of history, so hopefully this latest findings, will help exonerate Richard The Third.
