The Bastard Princes in the Bloody Tower; Part One: Pretenders to the Throne

The story of Richard III’s rise to kingship and the fate of his nephews, one of whom he had supplanted on the throne, is mysterious for many reasons. There are the questions of what actually befell the princes, whether or not they were actually murdered, and if not, what may have become of them. Then there is the further question of who was responsible for their fate, whether Richard was indeed the villain he is often characterized to be. And it’s this question that reveals our recurring theme: the unreliability of historiography. As we shall see in this two-part series on the topic, the record we have received may be grossly inaccurate, a reflection of contemporary historians’ political associations and the pressure placed on later historians to propagandize for the current dynasty. Modern historians tend to fall into a couple of camps: traditionalists, who favor the received version of history as written by Sir Thomas More and immortalized in Shakespeare’s tragedy, which took it even further by portraying Richard as a scheming dissembler and murderous hunchback, and revisionist Ricardians, who espouse the other extreme, that Richard was innocent of all the charges heaped on him and has been wronged by a history written by the victors of a war he lost. The mystery, as always, is where the truth might lie.

It is easy to accept the version of this story that says Richard was a ruthless schemer for the simple fact that he did indeed make moves to seize the throne after his nephew had already been proclaimed King Edward V, but one must consider Richard’s actions in the context of his era and its numerous civil wars over the monarchy, struggles into which he was born, all of which were family affairs. When the Plantagenet King Edward III died in 1377, a year after his eldest son had died, the throne passed not to his next eldest but to the 10-year-old heir of his recently deceased son, crowned Richard II. Meanwhile, two of Edward III’s surviving sons—John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, and Edmund, the Duke of York, both uncles of King Richard II—established long-lasting branches of the Plantagenet family. The boy-king ended up reigning 22 years before Henry of Bolingbroke, a son of the Lancastrian branch of the family and therefore the king’s own cousin, seized the throne from him, thereby establishing a Lancastrian dynasty that would pass from Henry IV, to the renowned Henry V, to the less-than-legendary Henry VI, who inherited the throne at 9 months old and grew into a man of unsound mind and a feeble ruler with no viable heir. It was during the reign of Henry VI, with outrage at the loss of English territories in France and the rather open liaisons of the conniving Queen Margaret, that many turned to yet another Richard Plantagenet, the grandson of Edmund, Duke of York, urging him to take the throne for himself. Thus the conflicts between the Lancastrian and the Yorkist branches of the family began. When Henry VI’s mental illness worsened, the Duke of York became protector of the realm by parliamentary decree and ruled England, curtailing Queen Margaret’s power, but when the king’s senses improved slightly, the Queen pushed to have the Duke of York’s position revoked and to consolidate the nobility against the Yorkists, claiming that they conspired against the king and his rightful heir, a child whom many believed to have been fathered by one of Margaret’s lovers rather than by Henry. So the War of the Roses commenced, so called because of the heraldic devices of the two houses, the Lancastrian branch of the family having the symbol of the red rose and the Yorkist branch the white rose. Although a civil war waged by noble knights, it saw a number of battles. At the First Battle of St. Albans, Yorkists succeeded and regained the protectorship. Later, after another Yorkist victory at Blore Heath, the Lancastrians took back power at the Battle of Ludford Bridge and branded the Yorkists traitors, causing the Duke of York to flee to Ireland. This was followed by a Yorkist victory at Northampton, where the king was taken captive, prompting Queen Margaret to flee to Wales. With the Duke of York now set to inherit the throne from the feeble-minded Henry VI, things did not look good for the Lancastrians, but with a newly raised army, Lancastrians returned in force and dealt the Yorkists a decisive blow at Wakefield, where Richard, the Duke of York, leaving the safety of a castle to meet a small force, fell in battle after a larger Lancastrian force that had been hiding in the forest surprised and overwhelmed him. It’s said that after he was taken, the duke was made to wear a garland of bulrushes as a mock crown, told to sit on an anthill as though it were his throne, and was taunted as a “king without heritage…and prince without people” before the Lancastrians finally decapitated him and brought his head to Queen Margaret on a pike. And in a final loss, the duke’s 17-year-old son, Edmund, the Earl of Rutland, after being captured, was stabbed in the heart by a Lancastrian lord as he knelt in terror, raising both hands in a silent plea for mercy.

The Murder of Rutland by Lord Clifford, via Wikimedia Commons

Now we come to the more principal characters of our story, the Duke of York’s other sons: Edward, 19; George, 11; and young Richard, 8 years old. Edward took up his slain father’s campaign and led Yorkist forces to victory at Mortimer’s Cross. The Lancastrians countered with a victory at the Second Battle of St. Albans, but it didn’t matter, for Edward had entered London with much fanfare and was acclaimed by the council there as King Edward IV, the first true Yorkist king of England. Thereafter leading his army to an absolute triumph over Lancastrians at Towton and driving Queen Margaret northward to Scotland with the deranged former king and her likely bastard son in tow, King Edward IV went about putting the affairs of state in order. He made his brother George the Duke of Clarence, and his little brother Richard he named the Duke of Gloucester. Now during Edward’s rule, Queen Margaret continued to make abortive attempts to restore her poor, mad husband to the throne, but the bigger conflict that Edward faced came from one who had been his staunchest ally, the Earl of Warwick, called the “kingmaker” for his tireless efforts in getting Edward crowned. To further illustrate Warwick’s loyalty to Edward, it was he who continued to lead Yorkist forces against the Lancastrian forays from Scotland, eventually driving Margaret to flee to France with her son, leaving behind the non compos mentis Henry VI, who was eventually taken and immured in the Tower of London. So what could drive a wedge between the stalwart Warwick and his young king? As was common in a dashing young king, Edward enjoyed bedding women, which was fine with Warwick, but a schism appears to have arisen between them when Warwick was making arrangements for Edward’s marriage to the French king Louis XI’s niece, and Edward went and secretly married a commoner named Elizabeth Woodville, probably because she wouldn’t sleep with him unless he wed her. The entire thing was an embarrassment to the kingmaker, and add to that his resentment over the consolidation of power by the lowborn Woodville family, who had various advantageous weddings arranged for them, and the offense he took when Edward chose not to take his advice in matters of foreign relations, especially with the French, and you had a recipe for betrayal. And eight years into Edward’s reign, Warwick did indeed betray him, and what’s more, he tempted one of Edward’s own brothers to his cause.

Now because of the image we have received of Richard, you might assume it was this Plantagenet, this grasping hunchback, driven by his avarice and unchecked ambition, who betrayed his brother, the king. In that assumption, though, you would be wrong. Richard, the Duke of Gloucester, was ever an unflagging ally and loyal subject to Edward IV, as his personal motto, loyalté me lie, or “loyalty binds me,” would indicate. Regardless of his image as the little goblin-like creature that Richard is often portrayed to have been, he had grown into a strong young man and would prove himself a hero at arms in the struggles Edward IV would soon face. Rather, it was the middle child, George, Duke of Clarence, whom Warwick convinced to join his rebellion. George also resented the power wealth being amassed by the queen’s common-born family, the Woodvilles, thinking that they were reaching far beyond their rightful station. As an example of this perceived overreach, the queen’s brother, John, had entered into “diabolical marriage” with the elderly Duchess of Norfolk, Warwick’s own aunt, a marriage in name only that was very clearly just a scheme to bring money and lands into the Woodville family. George himself, meanwhile, sought to marry the kingmaker’s daughter, but his brother, the king, forbade it, believing the match would result in too dangerous an alliance. And indeed, it did, for George married her anyway, and then he and Warwick led an army against king Edward IV in 1469, succeeding in capturing the king and executing members of the queen’s family, including the offending brother, John, who had dared to marry Warwick’s dowager aunt. But these gains could not be held, and eventually Richard confronted their forces with a force of his own and simply took back his brother, the king, without so much as a battle. And in a stroke of generosity, the king did not even bother to punish the rebels.

Warwick the Kingmaker, proving his loyalty to Edward IV before the Battle of Towton, via Wikimedia Commons

This would prove to be a mistake, however, for Warwick the Kingmaker and George, Duke of Clarence, saw they had lost favor and could never improve their positions under the auspices of Edward IV, surrounded by his Woodville in-laws. They rebelled again the next year and were again defeated; then they fled to France, where they threw their lot in with the Lancastrian Queen Margaret. With Lancastrian forces at their back, they promised to rescue her husband, the former king Henry VI from the Tower and restore him to the throne, which they accomplished, driving Edward and his every-faithful brother Richard out of the country. But this Lancastrian restoration was not popular, especially since Warwick, who essentially ruled in the name of the still weak-minded Henry, had made arrangements for an alliance with the French against Burgundy. In a fortuitous turn for the Yorkists, the Duke of Burgundy, beset on all sides, had no choice but put its strength behind Edward and Richard. As they marched toward recovering the throne for Edward, they encountered their disloyal brother George, who true to character, switched sides yet again, threw himself at his brother’s mercy, and added his army to theirs. The three brothers entered London, and Edward was reunited with his wife, Elizabeth Woodville, who in his absence had borne him a male heir and named the boy after his father. Thereafter, Edward the IV routed the Lancastrian forces in two decisive battles at Barnet and Tewkesbury. At both, Richard fought valiantly beside his brother to settle the War of the Roses. And afterward, in a dark foreshadowing of what was to come, the poor, mad Lancastrian monarch, Henry VI, died in the Tower of London, likely murdered in an effort to end the line of the Lancastrian pretenders once and for all.

From then until his passing in 1483, Edward IV ruled as the undisputed king of England. During his reign, the loyal Richard did well for himself, as significant lands came into his possession, many of which had belonged to traitors. Of course, the acquisitive Woodville clan also continued to grow their influence and means. In contrast, the other Plantagenet brother, George, Duke of Clarence, despite all his treachery, still smoldered with bitterness over the favor that Richard had earned and that the low-born Woodvilles had received. He became envious and erratic. More than once during his adventures he had been promised the throne by his co-conspirators, and this notion seemed to haunt him. After his wife died, he sought to increase his influence through marriage, but Edward again forbade his chosen marriage for various reasons, and to add insult to injury proposed a Woodville, another brother of the queen, for the same marriage, sending his brother George into a downward spiral of animosity and unpredictable behavior. He refused to dine with the king, citing fears that they would poison him, and he began to flaunt his disobedience for the rule of law, accusing a servant of poisoning his late wife, robbing her and having her hanged without due process. When Edward spoke against his actions, George had the gall to denounce the king, going so far as to raise an old libel that Edward was illegitimate, essentially claiming that his own mother had engaged in adultery with a French archer while living abroad, Edward being the issue of this clandestine dalliance, making him a bastard unworthy of sitting the throne. Obviously Edward could no longer tolerate his brother’s behavior, for these latest outbursts seemed designed to undermine his very rule and strengthen his brother’s claim to the throne. Therefore, in January of 1478, George, Duke of Clarence, brother and erstwhile betrayer of the king, was executed, according to some reports, by being drowned in a cask of wine, as were his final wishes.

George, Duke of Clarence, drowned in a barrel of wine, via Modern Medievalism

Readers of the first book of the Song of Ice and Fire series or its television adaptation, Game of Thrones, will find parallels in this passage of English history, as indeed it would seem the author George R. R. Martin took at least some inspiration from it. Richard, who had already been made constable of England, established himself as Lord of the North, governing the northern country for his king and shielding the realm from threats out of Scotland. He had helped the king take the kingdom, but he did not necessarily agree with the way he governed it, specifically disagreeing with a treaty the king had made with France and with the execution of his brother, George. Meanwhile, the king’s scheming wife and her power-hungry family consolidated their power at the seat of the realm’s government, and the king gave himself over to profligacy, philandering and drinking until he grew fat and unhealthy. Then one day, the king went out for a bit of sport, fishing to exact, and grew ill upon his return, prompting rumors that he had been poisoned. In April of 1483, Edward died, leaving his 12-year-old son the heir apparent to the crown, but the similarities with Game of Thrones don’t cease there, for before the boy could be crowned Edward V, accusations of his illegitimacy would be raised. But of course, things would play out far differently in this tale than they did in Martin’s.

According to a deathbed revision of Edward IV’s will, Richard was to be the protector of the young king, and having the boy in his charge would mean that Richard would essentially rule. This may have been an attempt on Edward’s part to avoid civil war, for he knew that many would fear the minority rule of his son and would resent the Woodvilles’ unchecked ascendance if the queen remained the boy’s protector, as had originally been planned. But the Woodvilles were not about to accept this limitation on their power and immediately set about scheming how they might avoid sharing power with Richard. First they delayed news of Edward’s death being sent to Richard in the North. Then they seized all the treasure and arms stored in the Tower of London and took control of the English fleet. Finally, taking the dubious position that Richard’s protectorship would cease as soon as the king was crowned, they made all haste to gather an army and escort young Edward to London, where he would be crowned Edward V without delay and, in forming his own council, cement forever the power of the Woodville family. But Richard was aware of their machinations and set out himself with a far smaller force to meet and accompany them. The queen’s brother Anthony, Lord Rivers, led an army of some 2,000 accompanying the boy, and he made efforts to avoid Richard’s party, leading Richard to believe they’d be stopping in one village when indeed they had moved on, and intending to march the young prince through the night while Richard slept, but Richard outsmarted Rivers, requesting that the queen’s brother come and dine with him and then taking the opportunity to arrest him. Then, in a dramatic gambit, Richard rode into encampment of the Woodville army, knelt before his nephew and declared that, as the boy’s father had wished, he would serve as the young king’s protector.

Gloucester conducting Edward V into London, via TudorsDynasty.com

And the maneuver worked. The troops fell in line. Richard accompanied his nephew to London, where the Woodvilles, including Elizabeth, her other son Richard, and her five daughters, having heard that Richard had control of the boy, had taken their treasure and sought sanctuary at Westminster. So it seemed that Richard had won out and would serve as Edward V’s protector. And seeming to take his role with his customary gravity, he swore fealty to his nephew and compelled the convened parliament to take the oath as well. Young Edward was installed in the well-appointed royal apartments in the Tower of London, the traditional residence of recently acclaimed monarchs. Then Richard set about dealing with matters of state, such as reclaiming the fleet stolen by the Woodvilles and preparing for the coronation. But everything changed in early June, 1483, when one Bishop Stillington testified before Richard and his council that prior to Edward IV’s secret marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, he had entered a so-called precontract of marriage with one Lady Eleanor Butler. This arrangement, witnessed by Stillington, had likely been made in order to bed Lady Butler, as the rakish King Edward IV had been known to make all kinds of promises in order to wear down the resolve of his sexual conquests, but according to canon law, a precontract such as this was essentially the same as an actual marriage, thereby invalidating Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville and making of Richard’s young nephew a bastard with no claim to the throne. As his council prepared to take this case to parliament, Elizabeth Woodville made arrangements to release her other son from their sanctuary in Westminster so that he could join his brother in London, thereby placing both princes in the Tower and under Richard’s control by the time he disclosed the scandal that illegitimated both of them. And on June 25th, Parliament convened and, after considering the evidence that the princes were technically bastards, they acclaimed the princes’ uncle King Richard III.

We see here some stirrings of the power-hungry character of Richard III that has been traditionally transmitted to posterity. The simple timing of Stillington’s revelation makes it dubious to many historians who see in it a very convenient means by which Richard could seize the throne. But what we must scrutinize is whether Richard has been misrepresented, whether his reputation as a villain is accurate or earned or whether he has been wronged by propagandists distorting the past. Bertram Fields, the author of my principal source for this series, Royal Blood: Richard III and the Mystery of the Princes, offers a balanced and most unbiased look at the many historians who have helped in creating the image of Richard III that persists today. He points out the dubious assumptions of traditionalists and revisionists alike, he lays out which ancient chroniclers wrote their histories at or near the time of the events in question and whether their political ties may have colored their depictions, and he takes note of who wrote about Richard after he had been deposed, during the reign of Henry Tudor, the pretender who successfully took the throne from him and went on to malign his name unceasingly—and press historians to do the same—in an effort to further legitimize his own reign. Under Henry VII’s auspices we get some of the most ludicrous myths about Richard, such as that he gestated in his mother’s womb a full two years before emerging with a full head of hair and complete set of teeth. Perhaps the most influential work on Richard III, an unfinished history by Sir Thomas More that he had abandoned but which saw publication after his death, is also one of the principal sources for the nefarious image of Richard, inspiring as it did Shakespeare’s play. But is there any accuracy to the image of Richard that More left us and that Shakespeare popularized—of a monster out of legend, a hunchback with a withered arm and legs of different lengths, lurching about scheming against family and children? As far as the deformities are concerned, likely not. Richard was a renowned warrior known to wield swords, lances and even a battle-ax with expertise, often as not while also riding a horse! None of that would have been possible with a withered arm. As for the hunchback, there is no evidence of his having had armor specially forged to accommodate any deformity such as this. In fact, there are many accounts that describe Richard, commenting on his likeness with his father or remarking on how well-formed a figure he cut. Even in illustrations made after his death, when there would be no pressure to flatter him and indeed when there probably would have been encouragement to make him look bad, Richard is depicted as a healthy and even handsome man. While there do exist some portraits that show one of his shoulders being higher than the other, these have been shown through x-ray to have been altered after the fact, clearly in order to corroborate the legend of Richard’s deformities. What’s more, they couldn’t even agree on which shoulder they should put a hump on! Then in a modern twist, in 2012, a skeleton was found in car park, and it is believed by many historians to have been confirmed through radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis to be the remains of Richard III, although some still have doubts. Interestingly, this skeleton does show signs of scoliosis that may have caused one shoulder to be higher than the other but would not have caused a hunchback or even precluded an active lifestyle, and there is certainly no indication of a withered arm.

Comparison showing alterations to Richard’s portrait, via richard3rd

So the campaign of propaganda seems to have been genuine, a fact which casts doubt on many stories about Richard. It has been claimed that, when Richard was gathering property during his brother’s reign, he actually coerced an elderly widow into signing over her lands to him under threat, an allegation that, if true, would certainly seem to cast him as the greedy and ruthless villain. But the facts of the matter are not so clear. In truth, the old woman was to be deprived of all property by order of the king because her son had organized a treasonous invasion of England, and it was common for lands belonging to traitors and their families to be seized. And it would seem the supposed threat was actually a choice. The lady might remain at the nunnery where she had been forced to reside or take up residence in Richard’s own house in the North and receive a yearly stipend in exchange for the transfer of ownership to Richard of lands that were of no use to her anyway since the king had made his decision against her family. When considered closely, Richard comes off as rather kind in this exchange. And this is true of many affairs in his life. He frequently erred on the side of mercy when dealing with the nobility, even when they engaged in open rebellion. And during his brief reign, rather than ruling as an iron-fisted despot, he is known to have been a beneficent king, undoing injustices that had long been in place, such as the practice of “benevolences,” when the king simply seized wealth and called it a gift. He also strengthened due process and the rights of the common man to petition for change. In all, his rule seems to have been well loved, even if he were not.  And it’s not even certain that he wasn’t well-loved. Some historians see his final defeat at Bosworth Field to be the result of the noble families turning against him, but as we shall see, many noble houses turned out to fight for their king, and his defeat seems more due to a couple of unfortunate betrayals by nobles known for their duplicity and by some reckless decisions on his own part.

Nevertheless, the fact that the revelation of a precontract of marriage preceding Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was disclosed just before Edward the V’s coronation does seem suspect. But was that the timing of its revelation? As Bertram Fields indicates in his book, there is good reason to believe that Bishop Stillington had come forward with this bombshell years earlier. During the time that Richard and Edward’s brother, George, was making treasonous claims and was on his way to getting himself executed, Bishop Stillington was himself arrested and jailed for a time for making statements against the king. We may not know what those statements were, but common sense would dictate that they were the same statements he would later make, based on the special knowledge he had of the precontract. Thus, among the claims that got George executed may have been that, not only was his brother a bastard, but his children, the princes, also were bastards. Stillington does not appear to have been regarded as a dishonest man who would make up such accusations without grounds, and he also doesn’t seem to have had any real motivation for doing so. Edward IV had taken good care of him, making him a bishop just after his marriage to Woodville—perhaps in exchange for his silence over the precontract with another woman? And he stood nothing to gain from lying on Richard’s behalf either, as Richard appears to have offered him no elevated position after his testimony. Indeed, if he were lying, this elderly cleric would have only been putting his own life at risk. And even what we know about the life of Eleanor Butler, the nobleman’s daughter with whom Edward supposedly entered into a precontract, seems to corroborate the story, for she is said to have entered a nunnery in heartbreak.

So, after all, perhaps this was a genuine revelation that the bishop brought to Richard, having waited until after Edward’s death for fear of being jailed again. Think of Richard, confident in his own ability to rule England and troubled at the thought of England under the minority rule of a boy controlled by the Woodville upstarts, now being confronted with evidence that the boys were not technically legitimate and therefore would not serve as the king’s heirs. Was he not right to take the throne to which he had as much a claim as his brother before him? Parliament certainly seems to have believed he was right to do so. And on the throne he could do what was right, staying to true to his motto and remaining loyal to his family, like his nephews, the newly bastardized princes, who despite the circumstances of their birth would remain honored guests at Richard’s court. He moved the boys, who had been residing at the Tower of London during all this, into interior apartments in the Garden Tower, which would later come to be known as the Bloody Tower. And perhaps it would be easier to dismiss the many misrepresentations of Richard as artifacts of a history composed by his conquerors were it not for the fact that the princes seem to have disappeared after that and a rumor began to circulate in the kingdom that some terrible fate had befallen them.

The Princes in the Tower, via Wikimedia Commons

Be on the lookout for part two of the Bastard Princes in the Bloody Tower, in which we’ll further explore the fate of little Edward and Richard, the vanished Plantagenet princes.

Blind Spot: Babes in the Wailing Wood

In this installment, we remain in England for another tale of unfortunate youth that may or may not be pure fiction. If you recall, in my last entry, on the Green Children of Woolpit, I mentioned that a theory has arisen locally in Suffolk that the lost youth of St. Martin’s Land were actually one and the same with the well-known Babes in the Wood, a pair of children who, according to tradition, had been betrayed to their deaths by their ruthless uncle. Now, we made short work of this theory, as the tradition tells us the Babes in the Wood died, and did so far northward of Woolpit, in the woods of Norfolk. And the suggestion that they had been turned green by arsenic poisoning, which was never a part of the traditional tale of the Babes in the Wood, also seems to have confused the symptoms of arsenic poisoning generally with the medium by which arsenic poisoning often occurred in the 19th century: green dye in clothing. Yet as we look further at the story of the Babes in the Wood, we see that there remains some mystery there to untangle. Indeed, the tradition is very much like that of the Green Children, only without the fantastical elements implying otherworldly visitation. The story originated as a ballad, or a poem kept alive through transmission as a popular song, and this one in particular became a popular nursery rhyme as well. Indeed it has been claimed that for many years, every child in England knew the poem by heart. The mystery arises from the fact that ballads frequently tell the stories of real, although perhaps embellished, people and events. So the question then becomes, were the Babes in the Wood real? Or is the story merely a fiction that has passed into folklore? If you ask villagers in Watton and Griston, which can be found on either side Wayland Wood, where the children are supposed to have died, many will tell you it’s a true story and point to their village signs, which offer depictions of the children at the sword point of their abductor and lost and dying in the forest, respectively. If real, then who were these children whose heinous murder has been immortalized in storybooks, and who immortalized them in verse?

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The ballad known as The Babes in the Wood tells the tale of a famous and wealthy gentleman of Norfolk who, along with his wife, became gravely ill. On their deathbeds, they promised a hefty inheritance to the beautiful son and daughter they were leaving behind, to be awarded once they had reached a certain age. In the meantime, they charged the children’s uncle to keep them. “You are the man must bring my babes / To wealth or misery,” quoth the mother, with a warning: “If you do keep them carefully, / Then God you will reward; / If otherwise you seem to deal, / God will your deeds regard.” And in answer, the uncle swore, “God never prosper me nor mine, / Nor ought else that I have, / If I do wrong your children dear, / When you are laid in grave.” Despite these promises, after a year and a day, he schemed to take the children’s inheritance, which would be his if anything were to befall the children before they came of age. To this end, he engaged two ruffians to take the children into the woods and slay them. The children went willingly, for their uncle had told them and all the world that he was sending them to be brought up by a friend in London. So off into the woods the children rode on horseback, laughing and making merry, accompanied by their would-be murderers. Listening to their innocent merriment along the way, one of the ruffians relented, finding that he could not do the dark deed. The other, however, was determined to carry out his foul task, and the two criminals fought there in the woods over whether or not to fulfill their evil commission. The ruffian whose heart had softened toward the children triumphed in the struggle, and he killed the other there in the woods in front of the children. This repentant killer then led the frightened children on, assuring them he meant them no harm, and they travelled farther into the woods for miles, until the children grew hungry. The ruffian told the children to wait there for him, and that he would bring them back bread, but the children wandered, eating berries and becoming lost. As night came on, they held each other and wept… and died of exposure.

Illustration from Caldecott's picture book, via Wikimedia Commons

The Babes in the Wood received no burial, the ballad tells us, except for that of some red-breasted robins that kindly covered them with leaves. And true to the warning given by the children’s mother, God did indeed seem to regard the deeds of the uncle and dealt with him accordingly. Huanted by fiends and his guilty conscience, he lost everything—his cattle, his lands, his own children—and he died in prison for debt. The truth of his wicked dealings eventually came out when the surviving ruffian, standing accused of a robbery, ended up confessing the entire affair. The uncle, therefore, got what he deserved, and one might be tempted to say the ballad is nothing more than a moral tale, an instructive nursery rhyme, perhaps one of Mother Goose’s, were it not for the insistence among many in Norfolk that the story is true. It is supposed by many that Griston Hall, a grand Tudor farmhouse, was the home of the story’s wicked uncle. And between Griston and Watton lies Wayland Wood, where locals say the abandoned children died. Local superstition says to avoid those woods at dusk, for even today, as the night falls, you can hear the cries of children there. For this reason, they call it Wailing Wood.

In order to ascertain whether there is any truth to the story, first we must trace it to its origins. We know that Thomas Percy, a clergyman of humble origins, was the first to popularize a version of the ballad in his 1764 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Much of the source material for this volume, according to Percy, had been rescued from an old manuscript full of ballads that he had taken off the hands of a housemaid just as she had been about to start a fire with it! Percy’s version of the ballad bore the much clunkier but informative title, “The Children in the Wood, Being a true relation of the inhuman murder of two children, of a deceased gentleman of Norfolk, (Eng) whom he left to the care of his brother; but this wicked uncle, in order to get the children’s estate, contrived to have them destroyed by two ruffians whom he hired for that purpose; with an heavy account of the judgments of God which befell him for this inhuman deed, & of the untimely end of the two bloody ruffians: to which is added a word of advice to executors.” With a title like that, why read the poem? The ballad became immortalized when the famous R. Caldecott illustrated it as a picture book in 1879 under the far more memorable title, The Babes in the Wood. But who was the actual author of the ballad? Percy traced the ballad to a 1601 play by Robert Yarrington, suggesting that the balladeer adopted Yarrington’s story for the poem. Joseph Ritson thereafter discovered a 1595 entry in the ledgers of a stationer named Thomas Millington indicating the earlier publication of a ballad with a title that sounds strikingly familiar: “The Norfolk Gent, his Will and Testament and howe he commytted the keepinge of his children to his owne brother whoe delte most wickedly with them and howe God plagued him for it.” Thereafter, H.B. Wheatley further argued Yarrington’s play may not have been printed until years after it had first been written and/or performed, which would mean the ballad printed by Millington still may have been an adaptation of it… but regardless, we are no closer to the name of the balladeer, whether he or she was inspired by a play or the other way around. And to muddy the waters further, there is the distinct possibility that the ballad had descended from a much earlier date via oral tradition.

Cover of Caldecott's picture book, via Wikimedia Commons

One theory is that the ballad was a thinly-veiled version of the rumor that Richard III had murdered his nephews in the Tower of London after seizing power in order to ensure his claim to the throne. This, of course, is a historical mystery of great scope and depth that deserves its own treatment at length, but in outline, the story of the Princes in the Tower is as follows. After King Edward IV’s death in 1483, his 12-year-old son was proclaimed King Edward V, but the boy king’s uncle, Richard Duke of Gloucester, intercepted the boy on his way to London, claiming there was a conspiracy to control the young king. In London, Richard put the boy king in the royal apartments in the Tower, along with his 9-year-old brother, insisting they stay isolated for their own safety. Less than two weeks later, Richard declared them both illegitimate and had himself crowned King Richard III. The princes were seen that summer playing in the Tower garden but were never seen again, and it is popularly held that Richard had them murdered.

Some have argued that Richard was slandered, that Tudor propaganda, spread after Henry VII seized power from Richard, is responsible for these appalling rumors and the villainous image of Richard we have inherited. And there is much to support this notion, since another ballad that appears to be of the same era as the Babes in the Wood is a blatant piece of Tudor propaganda about the Battle of Bosworth Field at which Henry defeated Richard. However, where the Battle of Bosworth Field is specific in naming its characters, The Babes in the Wood is not. And where it is specific, the details fail to match. Richard III was not a man of Norfolk, and his nephews were two boys who did not die of exposure in the woods, as far as we know, more likely in a locked room. The differences, when listed, are many: the children’s ages, whether their mothers had died before their uncle’s betrayal, where they had been kept before their murder, whether their murderers had confessed, et cetera. If The Babes in the Wood were meant to correspond with the Princes in the Tower and to further besmirch the reputation of the deposed Richard, why change the story so dramatically that it is unrecognizable? Indeed, as propaganda, it would seem to be ineffective.

"The Princes in the Tower" by John Everett Millais, 1878, via Wikimedia Commons

Some have suggested that the rumor of the princes’ murder by Richard may have itself evolved to conform with the folktale that can be discerned in the Babes in the Wood ballad. Likewise, The Babes in the Wood may have evolved from a far older folk tradition. Indeed, folklorist Alfred Nutt, in 1891, argued that the Babes in the Wood theme appears to have been commonplace. In Wales, in the 12th century, a tale told of a King Caradoc, slain by his brother, who then dispatches his niece and nephew into the woods to be murdered by a huntsman who ends up taking pity on them and hiding them (Nutt 88). And even earlier, in the 10th century, an Irish tradition told of a king of Ulster who wed the High King’s daughter, but as she only gave him a daughter, he remarried to a woman from the fairy realm named Etain. A true wicked step-mother, Etain wished the girl to be killed. Servants were tasked with abandoning the girl in a pit, but as they put her there, the girl laughed lovingly at them, as though it were a game, and they found themselves unable to do the deed. So they gave her to cowherds to be raised, and she grew to be a girl of famous beauty who drew the eye of the king (Nutt 87). One can see elements of Snow White in these stories, and the mention of a child abandoned in a pit even calls up the Green Children again. The similarities with the Babes in the Wood are prominent.  In the older Irish tradition, we have a child taken by servants of a family member to be left exposed to the elements, but those tasked with the murder relent because of the child’s sweet innocence. Then the Welsh tale, hundreds of years later, is nearly identical to the Babes in the Wood, with the evil uncle conspiring to murder a nephew and a niece. If this does represent the transmission of the same folk tradition through the ages, one can clearly see the evolution of this folktale.

But there remains the stubborn insistence of locals at Watton and Griston that this all really happened. If this were nothing but a fairytale passed through the ages, how did it become associated with a “gentleman of Norfolk,” and why are people even today certain that the evil uncle used to live at Griston Hall? The answer may lie in good old-fashioned historical documentation. Some sources claim that the family from the ballad was the de Greys of Merton, who once owned Griston Hall, among many other properties. As the story goes, their Tudor farmhouse even used to have a mantelpiece carved with a depiction of scenes from the ballad. Records exist showing that the de Greys did indeed hold Griston Hall, and their story begins to look a lot like the Babes in the Wood when the family’s lands pass into the ownership of the young Thomas de Grey, orphaned at seven years old. Thereafter, when in 1566 at 11 years old he died at his step-mother’s house, the manor and all other properties passed to his uncle, Robert. Perhaps, as some say, there were rumors that Robert, maybe colluding with the step-mother, had Thomas killed to take the land. Certainly Robert thereafter struggled with debt and imprisonment like the uncle of the ballad, although his troubles were due to various claims on his estate and because he was an unrepentant Roman Catholic. And he died in 1601, just when Yarrington’s play was being published. So the broad strokes of the story are there, but again, there are many differences: there is only one child here, and he did not die in the woods so far as can be surmised. Also, we have here the possibility of an evil-stepmother as well as a wicked uncle, but perhaps the balladeer found this too complicated to set down in verse.  

So what, after all, is true? Doesn’t that always seem to be our question at the end of things? And as we have found before, stories we have received from the benighted past are frequently a snarl of true facts intertwined with folklore and falsehoods. Such may be the case here as well. Perhaps the saga of the de Grey family, circulated by rumormongering, began to take on aspects of an ancient oral tradition about a child betrayed and left exposed in the wilderness. And perhaps when the unknown balladeer composed the song, he saw in it material to rival the ever popular story of the Princes in the Tower and their evil uncle, Richard III, which Shakespeare had recently immortalized in his tragedy. One certainty is that the folktale continues to evolve. In 1879, it’s said lightning struck a large oak in Wayland Wood, and thereafter, this became recognized as the spot where the children (or child) had died. And on the Watton village sign, you see the babes reclining beneath just such an iconic oak. But was this part of the folklore before the lightning struck or just a dramatic addition to the tradition. Thus we see that old stories like these can be based in truth but then corrupted through oral tradition to incorporate folklore. This makes our history a tangle of different threads, exceedingly hard to pull apart, and the more we tug at one piece of it, the more it tightens into an impossible knot.

"Watton town sign" by sleepymyf is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Works Cited

Nutt, Alfred. “An Early Irish Version of the Jealous Stepmother and Exposed Child.” Folklore, vol. 2, no. 1, 1891, pp. 87–89. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1252949.

The Lost Youth of St. Martin's Land, or Woolpit's Green Children

In this installment, we finally retire from France and from ancient Palestine to the cold and misty environs of England in the Middle Ages. This is a ubiquitous story in some senses. One cannot seem to search the Internet for historical mysteries or strange occurrences in the past without turning up a "listicle" that features this tale in a prominent position. It has been touted as proof of alien contact by many who see in the tale a rather cinematic account of literal little green men, and held up by others as evidence of a mysterious subterranean race. But first and foremost, it has been considered an exemplary account of otherworldly visitation, in the sense of fairytales about a “Otherworld”…hence its evaluation in most historical circles as nothing more than colorful folklore.

The story did not actually reach a wide audience until 1850, when Thomas Keightley compiled a translation of it in his second edition of Fairy Mythology. Previous to Keightley, the story had mostly been read in its original Latin, through its two original 12th century sources: Historia rerum Anglicarum by William of Newburgh and Ralph of Coggeshall’s Chronicon Anglicanum. But after Keightley brought the story to the attention of the 19th century English-speaking world, it spread through reprinting and inclusion in many compendiums of British folk tales and fairy lore and even made its way into regional guidebooks. It is perhaps not surprising then that the story ranged so widely in the Age of Information, as it seems to have managed a respectable level of virality long before it even became common to think of stories as spreading like infections.  Of course, if we are to give such a popular tale serious consideration, we cannot take it as it has come down to us through centuries of the telephone game… rather, we must seek out the original sources, which surprisingly, treat the story as a true though mysterious incident, not a fanciful account of imaginary happenings. 

The first published work mentioning this strange incident is Historia Rerum Anglicarum, or The History of English Affairs by an Augustinian canon named William at Yorkshire’s Newburgh Priory, a work produced around 1198. Next it appeared sometime in the 1220s in Chronicon Anglicanum, or the English Chronicle of Ralph of Coggeshall, the abbot of little north Essex Cistercian monastery, but Ralph’s account had been compiled over the course of decades, including information from first-hand sources that could only have been gathered prior to 1188, so it can actually be surmised that Ralph’s account is at least cotemporaneous with William’s and perhaps predates it. Both tell the story of a small village in County Suffolk, East Anglia, by the name of Woolpit. This was an exceedingly fertile region in the Middle Ages, and thus well-populated, with a market town, Bury St. Edmunds, not far from the village in question, and connected by a network of trails and roads to other towns, such as Wyke and Lynn, so it was not such an isolated hamlet that any visitors would have been gawped at as alien. The village appears to have taken its name from a certain geographical feature, ancient ditches referred to as wolf-pits, which many assume to have been actual baited traps for the catching of wolves, and which some have suggested may have been engineered by Romans. It is in one of these pits, that our story begins, on a day during the harvest season, which judging from the mention in the story of beans being brought in from the fields we can presume was a summer day, that crop being gathered typically in July. The year itself may be unknown, but William of Newburgh tells us it happened during the reign of King Stephen, placing it between 1135 and 1154. 

William of Newburgh, via Wikimedia Commons

On this summer’s day, harvesters at work in the fields noticed two strange children emerging from the pit, a boy and a girl. This in itself may not have drawn their eyes as being out of the ordinary, but even a brief glance at them was enough to bewilder the villagers, for these children did not look exactly human. They had heads and arms and legs, all right, everything in proportion and faces with typical features… but their skin was of a verdant green color, and their clothing was of an unrecognizable style, in colors so strange they defied description. When the harvesters approached them, they seemed afraid, acting skittish. They spoke, but it was in no language the villagers of Woolpit recognized. Concerned for the children’s welfare, the villagers conducted them to the nearby manor of a knight, Sir Richard of Calne, in Wyke. There they were given food, but they refused everything, despite appearing famished, as though every dish offered them was unpalatable, or even inedible. By chance, some fresh-cut beanstalks were brought in, and the Green Children sprang at them ravenously, seeming to recognize something they could eat, although clearly they were unfamiliar with them, for they tore open the stalks at first, not realizing the beans would be found in the pods. These broad beans were the only thing they would eat for some time, but one daring taste at a time during the long weeks and months after their discovery, they tried other food and eventually acclimated to a normal English diet. As time went on, their skin slowly lost its greenish color, and they were baptized. After this, the girl, at least, grew healthier, but the boy became ill and died.

Not only did the girl learn to eat a variety of foods, but she also learned to understand English and express herself to her benefactors.  So, years after appearing in the wolves’ pits with her brother, it is said she explained to the knight, Sir Richard, where they had come from. It was a land where everyone and everything was of a lush green color, where the sun never fully shone, being lit by a perpetual misty twilight. She and her brother, out tending their family’s cattle, followed the herd into some caverns, where they had become lost. Hearing the peal of bells, they followed the sound and emerged from the caves into the bright sun of our world.

Ralph and William’s stories differ in some regards. For example, William of Newburgh says that she called her home country St. Martin’s Land, claiming that everyone there venerated that saint, a major figure in Western monasticism whose November feast day, a harvest festival, has been compared with Halloween. Though this was a misty and twilit realm, across a great river, William reported, inhabitants could see a bright land. William’s version of the story also omitted the cavern, having the children simply appear in our world after hearing the clamor of bells. According to Ralph of Coggeshall, she had become a servant in the knight’s household when she told her story, and she had turned into something of a “wanton and impudent” young woman, whereas William reported that she went on to marry a man from the nearby town of Lynn, where she was known to be living just before he had written his account.

Ralph of Coggeshall's Chronicon Anglicanum, via the British Library

The disagreements in these accounts serve to support the historical consensus that the story of the Green Children of Woolpit is nothing more than a folktale, passed from person to person and evolving during the course of its transmission. One folklorist even asserts that it must have been a traditional tale long before Ralph and William set it down in writing, though evidence of its previous existence is lacking (Clark, “Small, Vulnerable ETs”). Nevertheless, some of the earliest appraisals of the story reached a similar conclusion. In his 1586 work Brittania, William Camden called it a “prety…tale,” suggesting the children were “of Satyrs kinde” who had come “from the Antipodes.” Today we might take the term satyr as meaning a mythological creature, but to Camden it surely meant something more along the lines of a wild man. And if we take the Green children as wild foundlings, there certainly are parallels here to other, more recent stories of feral children. Think, for example, back to my episodes on Kaspar Hauser, the Child of Europe. When he slouched into Nuremberg with his note, he refused all food except bread and water, displaying a seemingly genuine physical aversion to it, as though his system could not process it, but eventually, as his mind learned to communicate, his body learned to accept meat and other foods. But of course, Kaspar Hauser did not speak an unknown language or wear clothing of an unrecognizable manufacture or have an unusual skin color. There is, however, a common depiction in ancient art of a wild man that is sometimes thought to be green and has even come to be known as the Green Man. This figure, known as a foliate head for the consistent detail of leaves worn in his hair, is quite common in medieval church carvings (Centerwall). Although some have argued that the Green Man may not be green, as most depictions of him lack color, he appears to be variously shown as either entirely hirsute, with hair all over his body, or as being covered, almost clothed, in foliage, and thus green. Could it be possible that the story of the Green Children is just a garbled folktale about two young foliate heads being integrated into the civilized world?

In searching England’s murky past for other examples of green people, some have looked to the Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, penned by an unknown poet sometime in the 14th century. In this tale, Sir Gawain, a young knight of the Round Table, accepts the challenge of a knight who appears all in green, riding a green horse. While later in the poem, the knight’s identity is revealed, some have suggested the Green Knight is meant to seem a wild man or foliate head, a Green Man combatant, as some might designate him, but in the poem, all take him to be a “aluisch mon” or elvish man (Puhvel 225). The challenge this Green Knight poses is to strike him now upon the understanding and acceptance that he would return the stroke in a year’s time. Gawain nearly severs the Green Knight’s head, but the knight merely picks it up and rides away, reminding Gawain to meet him in a year at the Green Chapel. This Gawain sets out to do, and on his way to his appointment with the elvish knight, he encounters a mist that readers of the poem might take to represent a passage to the Otherworld, for this is a recognizable motif in medieval Celtic tales of men passing into the realm of the fairy (Puhvel 226; Patch 627). In the poem, the Green Knight ends up being a mortal in disguise, teaching Gawain a lesson, but the elements present suggest that there was a tradition connecting elvish kind with the color green, if not with the foliate heads, and their realm lay obscured by magical mists. Thus could not the Green Children tale be a part of that tradition, being foliate-head elves or fairies from a land of twilit mists? A further element of their story that aligns with this interpretation has to do with their aversion to human food, for indeed, it is motif in fairy mythology that fairies hold the eating of mortal food as a taboo (Clark, “Martin and the Green Children” 211)

Original image from the manuscript of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, artist unknown, via Wikimedia Commons

If we then return to Camden’s Brittania, we see that he seems unsure whether the Green Children should be considered wild foundlings or visitors from the Antipodes, which would appear to be two very different things. We must then consider what “the Antipodes” might mean, what kind of place it is and how one would reach a little Suffolk village from there. Originally, the idea of the Antipodes was the notion of the other side of the earth, a kind of anti-earth, an upside down world, and a notion that evolved with our changing understanding of the shape of our world. Therefore when children dig a hole in their backyards and expect to emerge in China, they are in effect attempting to tunnel to the Antipodes. The Antipodes had long been thought to be inhabited, but as our conception of the earth changed, so did our ideas of the Antipodes and those who called it home. Whereas previously it was a kind of polar opposite zone, it became caught up with ideas of the Underworld and the Land of the Dead. And in the Middle Ages, it became a place of monsters and inhuman creatures. Thus it took no stretch of the imagination to conflate this Underworld with the Otherworld of fairy mythology. Specifically in Celtic lore, the Otherworld is often seen as being below ground, inside a hill or mountain (Patch 612). For a further example, consider the Irish Gaelic tradition of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the fair folk, or fairies, who dwelt beneath cairns and barrows. Thus we see that Camden’s assessment of the Green Children being of the satyr kind and being visitors from the Antipodes both can be interpreted as suggestions that they should be viewed as fairies, and the account of their appearance little more than a pretty fairytale.

However, not everyone who considered it thought that the idea of an inhabited underworld was purely the stuff of fantasy. Some even made of this notion a credible—or seemingly credible—scientific theory. In the late 1600s, an English natural philosopher and polymath named Edmund Halley proposed a radical new conception of the earth’s structure: that it was hollow. Halley is remembered today mostly for the comet that bears his name, but in his time, he was an authority on astronomy and gravitation second only perhaps to Isaac Newton. In fact, his theory of a hollow earth derived from Newton’s own calculations of the density of both the earth and the moon, a calculation that it turns out was incorrect. But it helped Halley to explain a scientific mystery that he had been struggling with for years:  magnetic compass variations, or the gradual shifting of magnetic lines of declination that were of great importance in navigation. Halley had hypothesized that the earth must have four magnetic poles, but he could not explain them or their slow movement. In fact, he would spend a great deal of his life tracking this anomaly, even captaining a little single-deck, fifty foot ship that was frequently mistaken for a pirate vessel and sailing all over the world in his efforts to document these variations in compass readings. The idea of a hollow earth and within it another earth with its own, slower rotation accounted for the extra set of poles he had envisioned as well as their unusual movement. He even allowed that this inner earth may be populated, saying, “I have adventured to make these Subterranean orbs capable of being inhabited” and suggesting that some luminous material in the mineral roof over the region might provide the inhabitants some kind of half-light. It did not take long before contemporary writers drew a connection to the Green Children, and indeed, in 1691, before Halley had even published his major paper on the theory, one John Aubrey made the suggestion that the foundlings of Woolpit had merely been travelers from Halley’s inner Earth.

Halley's hollow earth schema, via BRANCH

The theory of the inhabited hollow earth became common fodder for writers of fantasy and science-fiction. And the story of the Green Children of Woolpit itself, even before Halley’s hollow earth ideas, had also become their fodder, with some speculative writers even suggesting, despite the details of the original accounts, that the children had arrived in the pit not from below, but rather from above. In 1621, a brief aside by Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy suggesting that the planets and the moon were inhabited and that the Green Children may have come from one of them seems to have inspired a contemporary by the name of Francis Godwin, who wrote about a Spaniard’s voyage to the moon (Clark, “Small, Vulnerable ETs”). Once there, the Spaniard encountered Lunar people with strange clothing and skin of an unrecognizable color. There he learned that when the moon men were unhappy with their children, perhaps because of some predisposition toward character faults, they sent them to earth, where they would eventually lose their strange color. Here again, we see the story evolving and spreading like folklore. Indeed, in this case it has taken on the elements of fairy stories regarding changelings, or fairy children sent to the world of man, although without the kidnapping and substitution of human children. Nor would this tendency toward an extra-terrestrial hypothesis fade away. Rather, it seems only to have grown as the tale entered the modern era. Duncan Lunan, for example, paints the picture of a human colony established by aliens on a planet whose hemispheres remain either in scorching direct sunlight or in darkness, such that only a narrow band of inhabitable land remains in perpetual twilight, where these human colonists sustain themselves on foods genetically modified by aliens, giving their skin an unusual color. To this explanation, Lunan adds interplanetary travel via matter-transmitting stargates, and a secret agreement between the Knights Templar and extra-terrestrials that resulted in “Templars using windpower, waterpower and methane digesters running on horse-dung, to charge up devices which let them walk between worlds,” and somewhere in the midst of all this, the Green Children getting lost and showing up in Woolpit. In short, a perfectly rational theory… at least for where it first appeared: the sci-fi magazine Analog.

All of this to progress the assertion that the Green Children of Woolpit was nothing more than a folktale set down by Ralph of Coggeshall and William of Newburgh. Indeed, the folktale appears to have never ceased spreading. For example, in 1965, John Macklin, in his book Strange Destinies, shares a remarkably similar story that clearly seems to just be a corruption of the original. According to Macklin, in 1887, field workers in a place called Banjos in Spain (a nonexistent place, as it turns out) discovered two green children in strange metallic clothing near a cave. Taken to the home of one Ricardo de Calno, a ridiculously obvious adaptation of Richard de Calne, the children refused to eat. The boy died but the girl ate beans and lived, her skin color changing, and the tale she told matches that of the Woolpit girl’s pretty well. This blatant retelling of the original tale spread widely itself, adapted into a song by 10,000 Maniacs and copied and pasted onto many a paranormal website until it seemed like a separate story from the original. This seems a perfect illustration of how folklore is transmitted, spreading and evolving orally at first, then put into print and spreading thereafter which each new slightly altered inclusion in a text, until finally in the Age of Information we see tales of the fantastical gone viral. Indeed, most studies of the story consider how it has spread and transformed and dismiss any possible veracity in the tale because of the mere fact that it has been so often reworked and retold.

There is an argument to be made, however, that there may actually be some truth to the original accounts. As I previously noted, there is no evidence of this tale existing before the 12th century, and both Ralph of Coggeshall and William of Newburgh include a variety of concrete details in their accounts, including names of people involved and real places with verifiable geographical landmarks, all of which are hallmarks of medieval history and not usually present in medieval fiction. William even goes out of his way to defend his inclusion of the story as a true account, saying, “Certainly I long hesitated about this matter, although it is spoken of by many people. It seemed to me ridiculous to take on trust a story that had either no rational basis or a very obscure one. At last I was overcome by the evidence of so many witnesses of such weight; so that I was forced to believe it, and to marvel at what, for all my strength of mind, I cannot grasp or fathom.” Therefore, out of deference to William of Newburgh, let us endeavor to consider some possible rational explanations for such an incident really occurring.

The sign of Woolpit village, where many believe the story has some basis in truth, via Wikimedia Commons

Today, it seems that among those who live in the region, the story of the Green Children has been conflated with the traditional tale of the “Babes in the Wood,” a children’s story that first appeared as a ballad in the 16th century, telling of two children who after their father’s death were commended into the care of an uncle who conspired to have them murdered in the woods so he could take their inheritance (Clark, “Small, Vulnerable ETs”). As with the Green Children, there are some who claim this folktale is based on a real incident, but it seems difficult to get its details to conform with those of the Green Children story. Firstly, the “Babes in the Wood” story seems to have originated in Watton, Norfolk County, about 30 miles north of Woolpit, and according to the tale, the children both died there in Wayland Wood of exposure, rather than surviving to stumble into a wolf pit in Suffolk. Moreover, this explanation tries to suggest that their green discoloration was the result of being poisoned with arsenic by their uncle, but this doesn’t really pass scrutiny. Long term exposure to arsenic is known to cause a darkening of the skin, but not a green color, unless one is confusing its symptoms with the results of Victorian incidences of arsenic poisoning caused by green dye in clothing, but that is a different thing entirely and would be anachronistic in the 12th century. Moreover, nothing in this version accounts for their strange clothing and language or the girl’s eventual claim that she and her brother came from an extraordinary dusky land.

In the late 1990s, Paul Harris argued for a commonsensical explanation, suggesting that the children were actually members of a Flemish settler family that had lost their parents, perhaps having been displaced due to anti-Flemish laws passed in 1154 or having been the victim of violence by Flemish mercenary supporters of Robert, Earl of Leicester’s 1173 rebellion. Flemish dyeing and weaving practices were known to produce unusual clothing, Harris asserts, and their unrecognizable language, obviously, would have been Flemish. As for their green skin, he suggests they were suffering from chlorosis, or green sickness. And the tales of St. Martin’s Land? Well, in Belgium, St. Martin was venerated as the patron of children, so it would be natural for them to mention the saint… but here Harris waffles. Perhaps, he allows, the children were only referring to the nearby village of Fornham St. Martin, just north of Bury St. Edmunds. Or perhaps, he hedges, they meant St. Martin’s Hundred, more than a hundred miles south of Woolpit in County Kent’s Romney Marsh. Already we see his uncertainty begin to weaken his theory. Firstly, a long and arduous northward march from Kent would likely have been mentioned by the girl, and if they meant Fornham St. Martin, which was only ten miles from Woolpit, wouldn’t the villagers or their host Richard de Calne, a well-travelled knight, have realized where they meant? Likewise, would not de Calne or someone have likely realized they they were Flemings? Woolpit was not so isolated as to not be aware of immigrant populations. And even if one took Harris’s third possibility, that she referred to her home country by identifying it with St. Martin, why would she talk of there being no sun there? And as for the idea that chlorosis explained their skin color, anyone familiar with that supposed illness would consider the suggestion ridiculous, since it is widely accepted that there was never any such disease as green sickness. Chlorosis, also called morbus virgineus or the “disease of virgins,” was a common 19th-century diagnosis for symptoms that today might be attributed to anorexia nervosa or simple anemia. It was said to be a hysterical condition, relating to the womb, that could be entirely cured in young women by marriage, as through intercourse, semen would settle the womb. Even if one were to take this for a misdiagnosis of a genuine condition, however, despite the name “green sickness,” it usually presented as an ashen pallor, perhaps tinged yellow, rather than the overt green described in the Green Children. But, again, Paul Harris provides a further alternative for his scattered theory: that these Flemish kids dyed themselves green for camouflage… a suggestion I find hard to consider seriously.

Portrait of a young lady looking green behind the gills, so to speak, by Pietro Antonio Rotari, via The Artchive

Still… some dietary explanation for their greenness seems the most likely, since the girl is said to have improved upon changing her diet. And perhaps the pallor of anemia is a likely candidate, although, as pointed out by John Clark, whose work on this topic I have relied on heavily in this episode, anemia was quite common in the Middle Ages, and the villagers of Woolpit surely would have recognized it as such, so perhaps something more was at work. Clark puts forth the idea, based on their insistence on eating beans, that they clearly had been subsisting on this food and that their bodies may have been suffering for it. There is, he notes, a certain condition, called favism, an allergy to not only ingesting but even coming into contact with bean plants. It is most common in children, and as it attacks the kidneys, it results in extreme pallor and jaundice, the combination of which may have appeared greenish. It also results in death, as we see with the green boy. Nevertheless, while this is a strong working explanation, it doesn’t account for the stories the girl later told, which suggested that everyone in St. Martin’s Land was green.

For an explanation of her revelations, we will have to rely on Occam’s Razor, that philosophical principle that tells us the simpler of explanations is to be favored. Therefore, might we not simple consider that the girl lied? Perhaps a couple of similar stories will help to illustrate how a simple lie could mushroom into a long-lived folktale. 

The first of our stories was compiled by a well-known collector of folktales, Gervase of Tilbury (Oman 10). He tells of a swineherd who served a rich master. One day, the swineherd realized that a sow who had been ready to farrow a litter of piglets was missing from the herd. Fearing the wrath of his master, he searched for the sow near the mouth of Peak cavern, around which an extraordinary wind was known to howl. Determining that she must have wandered into the cave, and finding the wind mild at the time, he ventured in after her and wandered in the darkness for a long time before seeing a light and heading toward it. Reaching the source of the light, he found himself in a great cultivated plain where harvesters were hard at work. Beneath a tree, he found his master’s sow with her litter suckling. So he managed to return with the object of his search through the caves, where on the other side he found that night had fallen.

A good representation of how it may have looked, emerging from a cave into a lush and vibrant land, from a painting by William Guy Wall, via Wikimedia Commons

The second of our tales is shared by Giraldus Cambrensis, who writes of a little boy of Swansea named Eliodorus (Oman 11). Preferring not to apply himself to his schoolwork and fearing his master’s discipline, he fled to a little valley to hide. There, two small men, pigmies, discovered him and took him through a passage underground, from which they emerged in a fertile land with rivers and fields that, much like St. Martin’s Land, did not enjoy full sunlight. Rather, days there, while bright, were always overcast, similar to the misty environs the green girl described, and nights were inky black, with no luminous heavenly bodies to light the sky. All of the inhabitants of this land were pigmies, and their animals were likewise diminutive. Eliodorus met and befriended the little prince of this land, and thereafter, he used to go back and forth from his world to theirs until one day he stole the prince’s toy ball. Two pigmies promptly came to his house to retrieve the ball, and after that, the boy never found his way back to that underground wonderland. In his elder years, he became a priest, and it’s said that Eliodorus never spoke of that land of pigmies and his friend, their prince, without crying.

Interestingly, these tales appear to place the story of the Green Children in a clear wider folk tradition, but they also, when analyzed, offer an explanation for why the stories may have been fabricated to begin with. The swineherd, gone until late at night searching for the sow, may have felt a more fanciful explanation than that he had merely been an incompetent herdsman would blunt the wrath of his master. And the lad Eliodorus may have only needed some explanation for why he had not been studying, a lie that perhaps was charming enough that he used it more than once to explain his absence, and maybe even to explain where he had acquired ill-gotten toys. Likewise, when the time came to share her story, the girl—who perhaps, owing to her language and garb, had been a Flemish refugee, something that the knight Richard de Calne and other villagers even realized and kept to themselves to shelter her from persecution, who had recovered from the greenish pallor induced by her allergy to the beans she and her brother had been foraging for, an allergy that in the end had killed her brother—perhaps she, like the swineherd and Eliodorus, simply told a fanciful lie. Maybe this was in an effort to obscure her true background, or maybe it was a lark, a hoax played on the credulous. After all, she was known to have grown into a “wanton and impudent” girl, or in an alternate translation, “saucy and petulant.” Certainly she doesn’t sound like a reliable source.

But in the end, one can look at this story in more than one way and raise evidence to support a variety of interpretations and explanations. Indeed, William of Newburgh sums it up best: “Every person can say what he wishes, and can rationalize these events as best he can; but I am not ashamed to have described this unnatural and remarkable event.”

Works Cited

Clark, John. "The Green Children of Woolpit." Academia, 28 June 2017, http://www.academia.edu/10089626/The_Green_Children_of_Woolpit.

---. “Martin and the Green Children.” Folklore, vol. 117, no. 2, 2006, pp. 207–214. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30035487.

---. “‘Small, Vulnerable ETs’: The Green Children of Woolpit.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 33, no. 2, 2006, pp. 209–229. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4241432.

Oman, C. C. “The English Folklore of Gervase of Tilbury.” Folklore, vol. 55, no. 1, 1944, pp. 2–15. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1257623.

Patch, Howard Rollin. “Some Elements in Mediæval Descriptions of the Otherworld.” PMLA, vol. 33, no. 4, 1918, pp. 601–643. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/456983.

Puhvel, Martin. “Snow and Mist in ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’. Portents of the Otherworld?” Folklore, vol. 89, no. 2, 1978, pp. 224–228. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1260130.

Blind Spot: The Beloved Disciple and the Authorship of John

This Blind Spot will indeed be a companion piece of sorts with the last piece on the Man in the Iron Mask, for again we will be examining a historically unidentified person, someone whose identity has been much debated, with assorted likely suspects having been put forward by scholars. But additionally it will serve as a clarification of sorts to a statement I made more than once in my series on the Priory of Sion and Rennes-le-Château. In that series, I suggested that Mary Magdalene was considered a “beloved disciple.” In truth, there is a figure who only appears in the Gospel of John who is known by that moniker and is described in every appearance as “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” but is never overtly identified by name. The notion that Mary Magdalene was the beloved disciple is a common and an intriguing one, but it is by no means widely accepted. For one thing, a key passage in the Gospel of John featuring the Beloved Disciple appears to indicate that they are two different people: Mary Magdalene sees the stone has been rolled away from Christ’s tomb and goes to tell Simon Peter and the Beloved disciple, who then race to the tomb and enter. But those in the Magdelene camp feel the text itself cannot be relied upon, pointing out there appears to have been a campaign to besmirch the reputation of the Magdalene, portraying her as a prostitute when there is no evidence for this present in the Gospels. They suggest that her name may have been redacted, calling her instead “the disciple whom Jesus loved” so as not to admit Jesus’s relationship with her. You may recall this theory in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, which makes much of the fact that apocryphal texts, such as the Gospel of Mary, mention how much Jesus loved her. Now some believe this text actually refers to his mother Mary, but there are further mentions in the Gnostic texts of the Nag Hammadi, for example the Gospel of Phillip, that indicate Christ’s love for Mary Magdalene more specifically, and how he loved her more than the other disciples and would “kiss her often on her mouth.” But contrary to what Brown claims in his novel, these texts are not the oldest known sources of information on the subject; rather they have been shown to be far less reliable as they are centuries older than the canonical gospels, being composed hundreds of years later even than John, which at around 120 CE was written at the greatest historical distance from the events it describes. So let us consider further the evidence in the Gospel of John as well as the most widely held theories on the Beloved Disciple’s identity in order to reach a fuller understanding.

Holy Women at Christ's Tomb by Annibale Carracci c. 1590s, via Wikimedia Commons

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There are actually a number of places in the Gospel of John in which an unnamed disciple appears. Although not explicitly identified as the disciple whom Jesus loved, many still take these as further appearances of the Beloved Disciple. The first is in Chapter 1, verse 35, which mentions two disciples of John the Baptist who become the disciples of Jesus. If this is indeed the first mention of the Beloved Disciple, then it makes him (or her) one of the first to follow Jesus. Then much later in the book, Chapter 18, verse 15, after Jesus is arrested, the narrator relates that Simon Peter and “another disciple” followed. This other, unnamed disciple knows the high priest and gains admittance to his court, and afterwards is able to get Simon Peter in as well. Speculation that this also is the Beloved Disciple, mainly because of this conspicuous anonymity, has led to much theorizing regarding his or her identity and connection to the high priest. Those on Team Magdelene might suggest that, rather than a poor prostitute, she was actually a woman of wealth, for as it indicates in Luke 8, she appeared to be funding Christ’s ministry with her own money. Therefore, as a woman of means, perhaps high-born, the high priest may have recognized her. Others have taken this passage to suggest that the Beloved Disciple was himself a priest, but more on that later.

The first time the Gospel of John refers to the Beloved Disciple overtly is in Chapter 13, verse 23, when during the Last Supper, he or she is laying his or her head lovingly upon his chest. Clearly this sounds affectionate, almost approaching intimacy, so many have looked at it as further proof for Mary Magdalene’s candidacy, while others have even suggested that there is some homoeroticism present in Christ’s relationship with this disciple. Without endorsing either theory, for the sake of clarity and brevity, I will be using male pronouns when referring to the unknown disciple from here on, as most scholarship and theories hold the character to be a man. In this scene, we again find Simon Peter present. Jesus has announced that one of his followers will betray him, and Simon Peter, seemingly in deference to the intimacy of the Beloved Disciple’s position with Jesus, suggests with a beckoning motion that he ask Christ who this betrayer will be, whereupon Jesus identifies Judas Iscariot. After this encounter, and Simon Peter’s following Jesus to the court of the high priest, where a disciple who may be the same man manages to gain them entrance, we find the Beloved Disciple present at the crucifixion, in Chapter 19, verse 26, when Jesus commends his mother into the Beloved Disciple’s care. And finally, after the problematic detail of the Magdalene seeing the tomb had been opened and fetching the Beloved Disciple, indicating they were different people, we have the moment with this Disciple whom Jesus loved, in the company of Simon Peter yet again, runs to the tomb. The Beloved Disciple outruns Peter, arriving first to see the discarded linens, but does not enter, leaving Simon Peter to investigate further.

The Beloved Disciple arrives at the Sepulchre before Peter; by James Tissot ca. 1886–94, via Wikimedia Commons

Now there is one final mention of the Beloved Disciple, and it is a doozy. In the final chapter of the book as we have received it, a further encounter with Christ is described. Out on Peter’s boat, fishing, the Beloved Disciple sees and recognizes Christ on shore. In this scene, on shore, Christ tasks Simon Peter with caring for his flock, essentially raising him up as the chief disciple. Peter asks about the Beloved Disciple, and Jesus asks what it would matter to him if he had the Beloved Disciple live until the Second Coming. This causes the disciples to suspect that Jesus has granted the Beloved Disciple immortality, but the narrator of the Gospel dispels this notion, indicating that it had been more of a rhetorical question. Then, in the very next verse, he identifies himself, saying it is this Beloved Disciple who testifies to these things…essentially saying “That’s me! I’m the Disciple whom Jesus loved!” So the question of the identity of the Beloved Disciple has long been tied up with questions of the authorship of the Gospel of John.

Although the gospels don’t name their authors, they received their names through tradition, as their original audiences were familiar with their origin. Therefore, it has always been assumed that John’s gospel was written by someone named John. The traditional view is that the author of the Gospel of John is John the Apostle, sometimes referred to with his brother as a son of Zebedee. In truth, however, the name translated first in Greek and eventually into English as John was an extremely common Palestinian name, such that the authorship of this gospel is a matter of debate. And it has been pointed out that the Sons of Zebedee were present in the boat on the Sea of Tiberius in Chapter 21 and appear to be separate people from the unnamed Beloved Disciple, whose anonymity had been so carefully cultivated throughout the book. This would therefore rule out John the Apostle. But there is no shortage of Johns to choose from. There is John Mark, but he is usually credited with writing the Gospel of Mark. There is John the Baptist, but he is referred to explicitly by the narrator rather than coyly, as the Beloved Disciple always is. Other candidates include John of Patmos and the more obscure John the Presbyter, all of whom vie for credit not only for the composition of the this gospel, but also the Epistles of John and the Book of Revelation—the so-called Johannine works. Then there is the notion, as previously stated, that this John was some unknown priest, for if he is the same unnamed disciple who entered the high priest’s court, he appears to have had connections, and this background would jibe well with the literary quality of the gospel, which does not seem to have been composed by an uneducated common man. But there is another theory that casts a wrench into the workings of any theory identifying these men with the Beloved Disciple. This being that Chapter 21 of the Gospel of John was a later addition to the book, and that its identification of the author with the Beloved Disciple is inaccurate. Many scholars point to the end of the previous chapter as evidence that this was the true original end of the book, for it concludes with a literary embellishment indicating that Jesus had performed many other works that the book had not mentioned, a flourish that is repeated again at the end of the next chapter which it is argued was appended to clarify certain doctrinal points—such as that Peter was the true head of the church, or perhaps that the Beloved Disciple certainly wasn’t a woman with whom Jesus was romantically involved.

Saint John the Evangelist, by Domenichino c. 1624-29, via Wikimedia Commons

So the search for the Beloved Disciple continues. If his identity is not tied up with the John who wrote the book, then who was he? There have been manifold further theories. It has been pointed out that we have names for all Twelve Apostles, and even from the Book of Acts for disciples who were recommended to replace Judas, Joseph Barsabbas and Matthias, because they had followed Jesus from the beginning. Indeed, beyond the Twelve, there were at least 72 other followers during Jesus’s lifetime who might have been referred to as disciples, according to Luke 10:1. There was Nicodemus, who had asked Pilate for Christ’s body, and Joseph of Arimathea, who had donated his own tomb for his burial. Either of these figures might easily be considered candidates.

Then there is the intriguing idea supported by James Tabor that the Beloved Disciple was loved by Jesus as a brother. Some traditions, supported by scriptural passages suggest that Mary had multiple sons after Jesus: James, Joseph, Simon and Jude. These would in effect be Jesus’s half-brothers, and of them, James is the most well-known. Again, we have some confusion among characters with similar names, as James the brother of Christ is often identified with another character, James the Less (as in the younger brother?) and confused with two Apostles named James, one a son of Zebedee like John, the other a son of Alphaeus. Tabor’s theory looks at the crucifixion scene, when Jesus tells his mother to look at the Beloved Disciple and says “behold your son,” telling the Beloved Disciple likewise, “behold your mother,” and he see a literal statement that the Beloved Disciple is another son of Mary.

Another candidate with a strong case is a follower of Christ not traditionally considered a disciple: Lazarus. Scholars in the 20th century have developed his candidacy quite convincingly. Floyd Filson, in a 1949 paper for the Journal of Biblical Literature, outlines this theory with powerful clarity. Earlier in the Gospel of John, the narrator makes it abundantly clear that Jesus loved Lazarus, including no less than three indications of his love for him (Filson 85). This adds weight and pathos to Jesus’s grief and the subsequent miracle he performs. Then, when the Beloved Disciple sees the discarded linens at the tomb, he is the first to believe Christ is resurrected, which is a far less dramatic assumption coming from one who has himself been resurrected (Filson 86). And finally, this theory does not shrink from the last chapter that identifies the author as the Beloved Disciple, suggesting that the events of the gospel all take place near Bethany, where Lazarus lived, making him a natural candidate for authorship as well (Filson 86-87). And the principal scene in the final chapter, in which the other disciples believe that Jesus is suggesting the Beloved Disciple might live forever, is further illuminated by the idea that the Beloved Disciple had already been raised from the dead (Filson 86).

Christ Raises Lazarus from his Tomb (etching) via Wellcome Collection

Among all of these competing theories is yet another, that the Beloved Disciple is not a real person whose identity can be uncovered, but rather a literary trope, a figure in more than one sense. Perhaps, some scholars have suggested, the Beloved Disciple is not named because he is not a man as much as he is an idea. By this reading, he is almost always presented as a contrast to Simon Peter, a character famous for his ambivalence and failings. At the Last Supper, The Beloved Disciple asks Christ directly what Simon Peter is too timid to ask. While they both follow Christ after his arrest, the Beloved Disciple resourcefully enters the high priest’s court while Simon Peter waits at the gate and later denies his devotion to Christ. While Peter is too afraid to witness Christ’s death, the Beloved Disciple bravely attends the crucifixion. In the race to the tomb, the Beloved Disciple arrives first and is first to believe in the resurrection. And at the Sea of Tiberius, the Beloved Disciple is the first to recognize the risen Christ. If one were to read this character as symbolic, then he might represent a model for devotion and faith, juxtaposed by Simon Peter’s weaknesses. But several of the ideas we have discussed—that the gospels have been redacted, that a new ending may have been tacked onto John to rewrite the origins of the book, and that major passages may be rather more symbolic than literal—lead to some big questions. If this gospel might be doctored, and if we are meant to read it as allegorical, with fictional characters representing ideals and abstractions, what does this mean for scriptural literalists? What does this say about the literal interpretation of other books in the bible? Perhaps the lesson here is that we should not be analyzing them as primary historical sources, searching for verifiable facts in them. Perhaps, as has been suggested of other portions of scripture, it is more useful to think of them as mythology and folklore.

Jesus and John at the Last Supper, by Valentin de Boulogne c. 17th century, via Wikimedia Commons

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Works Cited

Filson, Floyd V. “Who Was the Beloved Disciple?” Journal of Biblical Literature, vol. 68, no. 2, 1949, pp. 83–88. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3261994.

Eustache Dauger, the Secret Prisoner in the Velveteen Mask (aka The Man in the Iron Mask)

It began as a rumor bandied about in the court of King Louis XIV. In 1711, the Duchess of Lorraine, Elizabeth-Charlotte d’Orléans, a busybody sister-in-law of the king, wrote to her aunt, Sophia of the Palatinate, former Electress of Hanover, sharing a juicy bit of gossip concerning a secret prisoner of state that had been incarcerated at the Bastille for years. What made the story so titillating was the detail that the prisoner had been masked and was guarded at all times by musketeers who had been ordered to immediately kill the man if he ever attempted to unmask himself. Elizabeth-Charlotte speculated that the prisoner was an English nobleman who had been arrested as part of a plot against William III, but as the rumor passed on and the legend began to build, that part of it fell by the wayside. Among those to take up the rumor and add to it was Voltaire, who in 1738 began to claim that he had some knowledge of the prisoner, and that during visits to the Bastille had spoken at length with his captors. In Voltaire’s version, the prisoner had been made to wear a mask forged of iron for the intriguing reason that he looked so astonishingly similar to the king. Eventually, the myth grew to include some kinship beyond mere resemblance, suggesting that the iron-masked prisoner was indeed the identical twin of the king and thus a threat to his rule, a tale immortalized by the great novelist Alexandre Dumas. But long before Dumas made popular fiction of this legend, contemporary documents had begun to surface and efforts were made to uncover the truth behind this legend. These investigations would eventually reveal that the prisoner’s mask was not made of iron at all, and indeed, we would eventually be able to match a name to this figure… but surprisingly, this would not clear up the mystery surrounding him.

The first clues as to the identity of the man behind the mask came in 1769, when a Jesuit who had formerly served as the chaplain at the Bastille turned up the journal of the former second-in-command at the Bastille. An entry in said journal for September 18, 1698, spoke of the arrival of Bénigne d'Auvergne de Saint-Mars, the new governor of the Bastille, and of an old, masked prisoner he brought with him. Then in another entry five years later, the same officer recorded the death of that mystery prisoner, noting that during his imprisonment there he had been “always masked with…black velvet” and that he had been buried under the name “Marchiel.” Thus the detail of the iron mask was among the first fictions dispelled by primary source material, and the first clue to his identity revealed! The name Marchiel led to the first theory of the prisoner’s identity: Count Ercole Antonio Matthioli, an Italian minister to the Duke of Mantua. According to a 1687 Dutch article of uncertain authenticity that just happened to appear after the revelation of the name Marchiel, Matthioli had been kidnapped in 1679 by French authorities for some intrigue having to do with King Louis XIV’s acquisition of the city of Casale, and had been imprisoned under Saint-Mars’s care first at Pignerol and afterward at the island of Sainte-Marguerite. Proponents of the theory that Matthioli was the masked prisoner tracked down the parish death records of the masked man and discovered that the journal entry had misspelled the name as Marchiel, that it was actually “Marchioly,” which was indeed very close to Matthioli.

Historical reconstruction of the Bastille in 1420, via Wikimedia Commons

Historians pushing the Matthioli thesis eventually got hold of a wealth of primary source material in the form of correspondence between the masked prisoner’s custodian, Saint-Mars, and the marquee de Louvois, the war secretary, letters that discussed in detail how the prisoner was to be treated. Those in the Matthioli camp published much of this material, as it appeared to prove their claims that Matthioli had been imprisoned at Pignerol; however, it also proved to be the undoing of their thesis, as these letters showed that the man who would eventually be explicitly identified as the masked prisoner had been arrested and sent to Saint-Mars’s garrison at Pignerol in 1669, a decade before Matthioli’s supposed kidnapping. Furthermore, they showed that Matthioli had not been taken by Saint-Mars to his subsequent stations at Sainte-Marguerite island and the Bastille, as had the masked prisoner, and that Matthioli had actually died in 1694, almost a decade before the man in the velveteen mask had expired at the Bastille. And finally, this correspondence clearly provided a name that was far different from that under which the prisoner had been buried. The masked man had been called Eustache Dauger.

This name thereafter led historical detectives down another path. Eustache Dauger de Cavoye had been born into a prominent family, his father a captain of a musketeer company and his mother a lady-in-waiting to the Queen of France, Anne of Austria. Seeming to have disappeared from history after his military service, some 20th century historians came to the conclusion that the young man had settled into a depraved lifestyle and began trafficking in aphrodisiacs and so-called “inheritance powders,” a euphemism for poison, suggesting that he eventually found himself embroiled in the Affair of the Poisons, or the Chambre Ardent Affair. This was a massive scandal involving not only the widespread sale of poisons but also apparent devil worship ceremonies and infant sacrifice that involved King Louis XIV’s own mistress, an embarrassment that caused him to draw a veil of secrecy over the testimony and prosecution of those involved. Some historians went out on a limb suggesting the masked prisoner Eustache Dauger had been arrested for his part in this madness. To prove it, they pored over the surviving proceedings of the Chambre Ardent and indeed discovered a mention of a surgeon named d’Auger. However, this too, like the Matthioli thesis, failed to hold up under scrutiny, for other records showed that, though indeed this young man Eustache Dauger de Cavoye ended up in prison, he had not been secreted away at Pignerol but rather openly imprisoned at Saint-Lazare in 1668, where he would die in the 1680s.

What these theories failed to consider were the strange conditions of the masked man’s imprisonment, which the letters of war secretary Louvois and the jailer Saint-Mars make exceedingly clear. Why would there have to be so much secrecy surrounding the imprisonment of the Italian count Matthioli or the corrupt youth de Cavoye? That is the question that must be answered for any theory to hold water. Eustache Dauger appeared to be deemed a dangerous man for the secrets he held. And what’s more than that, he appears to have been not a nobleman or a well-bred bourgeoisie, but rather a lowly valet, a manservant.

Bénigne Dauvergne de Saint-Mars, governor of the Pignerol prison, via Wikimedia Commons

In 1669, then Captain de Saint-Mars served as commander of the prison within the French outpost of Pignerol in the Italian Alps, or as the Italians call it, Pinerolo in Piedmont. His only prisoner there was a man also deemed to be dangerous for the secrets he held: Nicolas Fouquet, former Superintendent of Finance who had been very publicly tried for corruption and sentenced to perpetual exile. Therefore, it seems that Pignerol was the place where Louis XIV customarily sent prisoners he felt must at all costs be sequestered from any contact with the outside world. Thus it was likely no surprise when the war secretary Louvois wrote to Saint Mars about the imminent arrival of a prisoner who must be kept completely isolated, in a special cell that commanded no view of any area where people might pass, behind a number of locked doors so that no guards could hear him speak. Saint-Mars was to personally attend to Dauger’s physical needs and to advise the prisoner that if he were to ever speak of anything other than his basic necessities, he would be immediately killed. Another dangerous political prisoner, Saint-Mars might have assumed, but perhaps he was surprised then when Louvois informed him that Dauger was just a valet and therefore required few creature comforts in his accommodations.

The precautions taken against the revelation of whatever secrets this valet held were truly extraordinary. He appears to have been arrested on secret orders and transported in hugger-mugger to the prison. He was only allowed to hear the mass said on Sundays for the other prisoner, Fouquet, if he were kept hidden away and precautions were taken to prevent him from speaking to anyone. A year after Louvois sent Dauger to Pignerol, he replaced the entire garrison, except for Saint-Mars and his staff, who remained the custodians of Fouquet and Dauger. In 1671, another political prisoner arrived, the count de Lauzun. Now with two noblemen in his charge, he had the unpleasant task of finding them valets, since apparently the nobility always required servants, even when in prison. Fouquet already had two valets, but when Lauzun required one, Saint-Mars asked the war secretary’s permission to simply have Eustache Dauger serve him, since Dauger had been a valet previous to his incarceration. Louvois forbade it, for fear that Dauger would by some indiscretion share the mysterious secret to which he was privy. Strangely, though, when one of Fouquet’s manservants died in 1674, the war secretary finally relented and said that Dauger could serve as a valet to the former Superintendent of Finance. Perhaps this seemed more acceptable, since Fouquet himself was feared to hold dangerous secrets and as he had been exiled for life, would never be able to share with anyone whatever further secrets he might learn from Dauger. Oddly, however, in 1679, the king relented in his strictness with Nicolas Fouquet and allowed him to have visits from his fellow prisoner, the count de Lauzun, and even to receive visits from his family. Before this, however, the war secretary wrote directly to Fouquet to receive assurances that Fouquet had learned nothing from Dauger of “what he knew” and “what he had seen…in his past life.” Whether or not Fouquet had admitted to learning Dauger’s secrets, he was permitted his visitations, provided that Dauger would never be present when anyone visited.

Pignerol, 1661, via Wikimedia Commons

When Nicolas Fouquet died in 1680, Saint-Mars discovered something problematic. The former Superintendent of Finance and the count de Lauzun had somehow managed to open up a passage between their separate chambers, which meant that not only Fouquet’s other valet but also the count had likely been in private with Eustache Dauger and may have been told whatever secrets he held. In order to somehow mitigate this breach, Saint-Mars locked the two valets up in the lower tower and lied to Lauzun, telling the count that the valets had been freed. Eventually, the count de Lauzun himself would be freed and restored to his former position, but the “men of the lower tower” remained in Saint-Mars’s charge and would until their deaths, kept in the utmost secrecy and not allowed to speak with anyone, even each other. Saint-Mars took them along with him when he received command of another frontier fortress to the northwest, where Fouquet’s other valet—an innocent man whose only crime was to have been in the presence of men with secrets—eventually died in 1687. Thereafter, Saint-Mars took his last remaining charge, the mysterious Eustache Dauger, with him to Sainte-Marguerite when he was promoted to governor of the island. Yet his orders still stood that no one was to speak to or even see the face of this Eustache Dauger, so he had the prisoner transported in a covered sedan chair carried by eight porters, a sight that inspired many rumors in Sainte-Marguerite. Once installed in his cell, however, which adjoined Saint-Mars’s own chambers so that no one else would have access to the poor, aging valet, he was not seen again until Saint-Mars’s further promotion to the governorship of the Bastille, the famous fortress in Paris. This time, however, instead of drawing more attention to his prisoner with the sedan, he simply elected to cover his face with a mask of black velvet, and thus the legend was born.

So who was this Eustache Dauger? Was “Dauger” a false name? Or was the name under which he was buried, “Marchiel” or “Marchioly,” the false name? Was he indeed a mere valet? Whom, then, had he formerly served? And what possible secrets could this poor manservant have been privy to that might have warranted such extraordinary precautions? The Matthioli theory further collapses when one considers that Matthioli’s imprisonment by the French had been no real secret. And even if it had been, there would have been no clear reason to mask him, since he would not have been a recognizable figure. Furthermore, had it been necessary to treat his incarceration so secretively, why bury him under so similar a name? Then there is the detail that the war secretary, Louvois, had left the name of the prisoner blank until after his secretaries had transcribed his dictation, only writing the name Eustache Dauger onto the missives before sending them to Saint-Mars. This would indicate that Dauger was the prisoner’s true name, held as a privileged secret, while the name under which he had been buried was the pseudonym. And this Eustache Dauger would seem to have genuinely been a valet in his former life, since even Vouloi’s earliest letters referred to him as such. Otherwise, it would have been foolishness to have him serve Fouquet in the same capacity.

So we are left with the final questions of whose valet this Dauger actually was, and what secrets he might have harbored. Andrew Lang, writing in 1903, suggested based on the timing of his arrest that Dauger may have been the notorious valet of Roux de Marcilly, a theory that proves to be one of the only explanations with some legs. Therefore let us examine it. This version starts with the negotiations of a secret treaty. For years, Charles the II, King of England, and Louis XIV, who were closely related as first cousins, had sought a closer alliance between the respective countries. Eventually this turned into earnest negotiations for the so-called Secret Treaty of Dover, which would see English ships and soldiers furnished for France’s planned conquest of the Dutch Republic in exchange for Charles receiving a substantial secret pension, provided he publicly convert to Roman Catholicism and restore the church’s power in England. It was during these lofty dealings that a suspected plot came to light, masterminded by a French Huguenot, and therefore a Protestant naturally predisposed against such a consolidation of papist power. Little is actually known about this Huguenot, Roux de Marcilly. Through a series of letters, he appears to have plotted with Charles II himself to form a league of Protestant nations against France and Louis XIV, thereby stemming the spread of Roman Catholicism. There is some doubt about Charles II’s genuine involvement in this plot, whether he really was tempted to turn against his cousin, perhaps because he was loathe to convert as Louis’s secret treaty required him to do, or whether he was humoring Marcilly while informing on him to Louis. Either way, Louis had the plotter kidnapped in Switzerland and tortured in the Bastille. He was accused of plotting the assassination of Louis XIV, but no evidence for such a plot existed, so they trotted out an old rape charge that may have been trumped up and sentenced him to death by the Catherine wheel for that. So awful and painful a death was execution by the breaking wheel, which involved having one’s bones smashed one by one and being slowly bludgeoned to death, that in his cell, Marcilly attempted to end his own life by cutting himself with a piece of broken glass. However, his guards caught him and cauterized his self-inflicted wounds with hot pokers so that he would survive to be shattered on the wheel.

A depiction of torture victims being broken on the wheel, via Wikimedia Commons

As Lang outlines in his essays “The Valet’s Tragedy” and “The Valet’s Master,” during his torture, Roux de Marcilly gave up his own valet, a man named Martin, as a co-conspirator. On the surface of it, this may seem absurd. When being tortured, one is compelled to give a name, and what better name than your lowly manservant, about whose life you may care little? And besides, whatever part Marcilly’s valet may have had in these matters was likely only performed in service to Marcilly, so he could hardly be considered a real player. Nevertheless, French authorities do appear to have been concerned about what the valet knew. After tracking him down in England, they questioned him, and Martin insisted he knew nothing, expressing reticence about accompanying them back to France for fear that “he would be kept in prison to make him divulge what he did not know.” Thereafter, however, the valet appears to have coyly intimated that he knew very much, perhaps because he enjoyed the attention, or perhaps in order to mock the French authorities because he felt himself safe in England. Unfortunately, the French thereafter asked Charles to surrender the man to their custody, and if we accept Lang’s thesis, which works well chronologically with Eustache Dauger’s arrest in Dunkirk in 1669, Charles gave up the valet, who was somehow—and here things turn vague—taken to Dunkirk (perhaps by a kidnapping similar to his master’s?) where he was arrested and given the prison pseudonym Eustache Dauger. In this scenario, which I find the most compelling, Dauger’s secret had to do with the existence of the Secret Treaty, about which his master clearly had information, or perhaps had something to do with Charles II’s intrigues. Nevertheless, there remain problems. If these were his secrets, then after a few short years, they would have been valueless and posed no further danger. And why keep him under lock and key for so long when they might easily have had him killed as they had his master? And why the great pains taken to conceal his identity and face? And if Dauger was a pseudonym for Martin, then why bury him under a third name?

Some of these questions can be answered with the sad assertion that this valet was merely a victim of bureaucracy and paranoia. There may have been reason to lock him away at the time, and thereafter it was only the perpetual, dogged enforcement of old and obsolete orders that kept him in captivity. However, the consistent inquiries about the prisoner in letters between Louvois and Saint-Mars indicate that even many years after Dauger’s incarceration, the king, or at least his ministers, remained concerned about what secrets the man harbored. Another explanation may be that, after allowing Dauger to serve as Nicolas Fouquet’s valet while at Pignerol, there was the further concern that Dauger, as well as the other valet, knew Fouquet’s secrets. As the Superintendent of Finance, Fouquet had once been among the most powerful men in France. Many, including Fouquet himself, believed that Louis XIV would eventually grow bored with the affairs of state and appoint Fouquet Prime Minister to rule France while Louis devoted himself to pleasure. Indeed, during his frequent meetings to go over ledgers with Louis, Fouquet appears to have exaggerated certain difficulties in the financial management of the state, perhaps in an effort to further persuade the monarch that he would not want to deal with these matters himself. However, Louis had other ideas about his kingship, and he had others whispering in his ears about Fouquet’s use of crown monies, suggesting that the Superintendent of Finance lived far too lavish a lifestyle for his own fortune to allow and that he must have been making personal use of royal funds. Indeed, Fouquet had built himself an ostentatious estate, and one day, after throwing the king a grand party, Louis, angry at the grandiose display of wealth, decided on moving against Fouquet. After arranging his arrest, Louis had him charged with various complicated crimes amounting essentially to financial chicanery, or more precisely, malversation, or corruption of office. It was a sensational trial, and with Fouquet’s many connections and allies, he managed to avoid a death sentence. Evidence turned up papers that came to the king’s attention, revealing letters from great ladies that Fouquet had seduced and accounts of the many men who were indebted to Fouquet’s generosity. The fact of the matter was that so long as Fouquet was alive, he posed a threat to the crown, so Louis had him shunted off to perpetual exile and received regular reports about anything his jailer might discover of his secrets.

Portrait of Nicolas Fouquet, via Wikimedia Commons

Clearly then, the valet Eustache Dauger may have been a supremely unlucky commoner. Having served one master that had dangerous secrets, he was then, while in prison, made to serve another master who held great secrets. And therefore he could never be allowed to leave. But this is strange logic, when one breaks it down, for the count de Lauzun surely also had opportunity to learn both the secrets of Fouquet as well as whatever secrets Dauger held, having excavated a passage between his cell and Fouquet’s and essentially had a shared chamber with them for years. Yet he was allowed to return to society. And even accepting this narrative, we still have no good explanation for why his face had to be obscured, unless it be a non-explanation, such as Louvois was being overly cautious by ordering that precautions should be taken to ensure that no one lay eyes on him, or that, in saying none should see him, Louvois actually had only meant that he should not be permitted to signal to others or have visitors and Saint-Mars had merely misconstrued the instructions to mean his face could not be seen. This is the crux of the mystery, I think: the mask and its true purpose. And this is what has led to the wildest speculation and the most outlandish theories. For example, novelist Marcel Pagnol, in the 1960s, combined the old myth about Louis XIV’s twin brother with Andrew Lang’s thesis to claim that the valet Martin involved in the plot against Louis was actually James de la Cloche, and rather than being an illegitimate son of Charles the II as many believed, he was Louis’s twin. Thus the fiction lived on.

And in a remarkable connection to our last two episodes, there is the titillating theory that Fouquet’s secret was the same as Bérenger Saunière’s secret. After all, there is an argument to be made that Fouquet’s life had been saved by the Catholic agents of a secret society, the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, or Company of the Blessed Sacrament, with which he had been involved. Perhaps they, like the supposed Priory of Sion, served as custodians of the Rennes-le-Château secret. And how would Fouquet have become an initiate? Well, he once received a letter from his brother, who had spoken to the painter Nicolas Poussin. An odd passage of the letter cryptically states:

He and I discussed certain things, which I shall with ease be able to explain to you in detail — things which will give you, through Monsieur Poussin, advantages which even kings would have great pains to draw from him, and which, according to him, it is possible that nobody else will ever discover in the centuries to come. And what is more, these are things so difficult to discover that nothing now on this earth can prove of better fortune nor be their equal.

And so we return to the spiraling conspiracy theory of Rennes-le-Château, which has led some addle-pated mystics to conclude that, directed by Poussin’s painting, the secret Bérenger Saunière really found there was alchemical in nature, the Philosopher’s Stone, which of course could make one rich but could also make one immortal. Then Fouquet’s secret was rather more a mystical one as well, and perhaps, after all, he did not die when the records state he did, but rather lived on, eternally young, a fact that had to be hidden by a velvet mask, for Fouquet would indeed have been recognizable and the fact that he hadn’t aged would certainly cause a sensation…. But such musings should be taken for what they are: fantasy. Remember that the masked prisoner was described as old when he arrived at the Bastille, and he died within a few years. So all we are left with, after all, are some possible suspects based on circumstantial evidence… sometimes less than that: mere coincidence! In truth, it appears that only a handful of men in 17th century France knew the identity and story of the masked prisoner, and they appear to have taken the knowledge with them to their graves. Therefore, that flimsy mask of velvet may as well have been an iron lockbox, concealing forever the answer to a riddle that has enthralled the world ever since.

An anonymous 1789 print depicting The Man in the Iron Mask, via Wikimedia Commons

Works Cited

Martin, Ronald. “On the Trail of the Iron Mask: The State of the Question.” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, vol. 19, 1992, pp. 89-98. Hathi Trust Digital Library, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015054071587;view=1up;seq=107.