Blind Spot: Little Dauphin Lost

In 1789 France, the Third Estate, or the commoners, formed the National Assembly in defiance of King Louis XVI, seeking more proportional representation and a constitutional monarchy. Fearing a military coup because of the king’s gathering of troops, revolutionaries seized the Bastille and its armory in July, and the French Revolution was underway. In October, when a mob of angry fishwives protesting the price of bread marched on Versaille and dragged the royal family back to Tuileries Palace in Paris to be held captive, the reality of the situation must of struck the young prince, or dauphin, Louis Charles, who at four and a half years was described as a joyful and carefree child previous to the ordeal his family was about to endure. To illustrate his temperament, upon learning earlier that year that his older brother Louis Joseph had died of consumption, the fact that he had inherited his brother’s dog consoled him far more than the fact that he was now the heir to the throne of France. And while he may have been sheltered from the reality of their captivity in Tuileries for some years, in 1791, when an abortive attempt at escape ended with the royal family returning to Paris, harried the whole way by vicious revolutionary commoners who spit on his father and ripped his mother Marie Antoinette’s clothes, and afterward, when the little 6-year-old was locked away with his family in Temple Prison, he must certainly have become aware of his predicament. When in 1793 his father bade him farewell for the last time before being taken to the guillotine, King Louis XVI made the nearly 8-year-old dauphin promise never to seek vengeance. And it would seem he kept that promise, for according to history, he never made it out of Temple Prison alive. Or did he?

In the summer of that same year, after his father’s death and Marie Antoinette telling Louis Charles that he was now the rightful king of France, Louis XVII, the boy was taken from his mother’s bosom and made to live with a new tutor, Antoine Simon, an illiterate cobbler who rather than edifying the dauphin proceeded to teach him to curse and sing revolutionary songs. Under Simon’s tutelage, the child was transformed into a “little sanscullotte,” an ill-mannered commoner who profaned his own mother as a whore. It went further than this, however, as those in charge of the royal prisoners were determined to debase them entirely. Winning Louis Charles’s affections with bribes of puppies and canaries, they induced him to make the most heinous of accusations against his mother: that she had sexually abused him. And yet, despite what sounds like it may have been a traumatic captivity, there is testimony indicating that Simon and his wife may have genuinely cared for their charge, as he appears to have been fed well and given a considerable amount of freedom within the prison grounds. However, now began the Reign of Terror, during which Marie Antoinette was guillotined—a fact never shared with the young dauphin—and much internal strife prevailed among radical factions. In early 1794, Antoine Simon’s position was terminated, and he and his wife were driven from their lodgings. At around the same time, other guards familiar with the child had also been removed from their positions, and thereafter, the dauphin was confined in a dungeon alone.

The Temple Prison, via Wikimedia Commons

It is noteworthy that the dauphin’s sister, Marie Thérèse, reported hearing noises on the day of Simon’s departure and believed it was the sound of her brother being removed and another prisoner being put into his cell. After that, we know little of the dauphin’s treatment except what can be gleaned from the later testimony of guards, who reported that his dungeon was crawling with rats, such that he was accustomed to leaving uneaten food on the table as a distraction so that he might get some rest undisturbed. Apparently, the boy seemed very inactive, and despite the shouting of guards from outside his cell, calling him a child of vipers and demanding he get up, he mostly lay in bed. After Robespierre met his end and his Terror subsided, a member of the National Convention investigated rumors that the dauphin had been rescued and found the child in his cell wasting away in his own filth, covered in vermin, lying on a cradle rather than on the bed because, as the boy claimed, this relieved his pain somewhat, for his knees were terribly swollen and he proved unable to stand. Efforts were made to clean the child and treat his illness, presumed to be late-stage consumption, or as it might be understood now, tuberculosis resulting in severe arthritis—a surprising eventuality since before his solitary confinement some 6 months earlier, he had shown no definite signs of the illness, and as Dr. Jan Bondeson points out in his treatment of the mystery, which I have relied on as my principal source, this would indeed represent an unusually swift progression of the disease.

As the prisoner’s illness continued to worsen, his guards maintained unusual precautions when anyone called on the child, insisting they not speak to him, and later, in 1495, as the child’s illness grew worse and he eventually died, the doctor who came to perform the autopsy, Dr. Phillippe Jean Pelletan, was sworn to secrecy about anything he might see during the performance of his duties. After the autopsy, during which Pelletan cut skin flaps away from the skull in order to saw into it, he replaced the flaps and wrapped a bandage around the head to keep the skin and the top of the skull in place, and it was in this condition that his body was identified by the guards and soldiers of Temple Prison. Thereafter, he was shuttled away in a coffin and supposedly put into a pauper’s grave at Sainte-Marguerite Cemetery, although rumors abounded that his coffin had been fished out and absconded with or that the gravedigger had subsequently disinterred his corpse to give him a more proper burial place nearer the church.

Plaque commemorating the "old Sainte-Marguerite Cemetery where were buried in June 1794 the corpses of 73 persons killed by guillotine, and on the 10th of June 1795 that of the dead child in the dungeon of the Temple," via Wikimedia Commons. 

The following year, rumors that the prince had not died in prison after all became hard to ignore when a teenager jailed as a vagrant in rural France claimed to be the lost dauphin. And he convinced many of his veracity, including one of the dauphin’s former guards at the Temple, before his father appeared and coaxed out of him a confession that he was just a swindler by the name of René Hervagault. Thereafter, in 1801, author Jean-Joseph Regnault-Warin wrote a novel detailing the dauphin’s escape from the Temple, and it would go on to inspire many a false dauphin just as it appears to have inspired Hervagault to renew his own claims, which now included the tale that he had sought help from Pope Pius VI and that the pontiff had acclaimed him the King of France and branded his leg so as to better identify him—a mark Hervagault could easily show to prove his claims. Odd that the Pope would take such a precaution when there had been no others claiming to be the dauphin at the time, but this detail would be taken up in the future by many another impostor claiming to be Louis XVII.

After the claims of Hervagault and the fiction of Regnault-Warin, another revelation helped to cement forever the legend that the dauphin escaped. In 1811, the wife of the prison tutor Antoine Simon began telling the nuns in the hospital where she had been admitted that she and her husband had helped the dauphin escape in a linen basket after smuggling another child into the prison inside a papier-mâché horse to take the prince’s place. She even claimed he had come to visit her in the hospital years earlier to thank her. While there is ample reason to doubt her story as a lie recasting her and her husband as loyal royalists when in fact the Simons were nothing of the sort, her story meshed somewhat with Hervagault’s, as that pretender had said he was smuggled out in a wicker basket. But it did not match well with the stories of the many other pretenders who would soon rear their heads. In 1815, a drunk vagrant who was probably an orphan by the name of Mathurin Bruneau showed up in Brittany claiming to be the Lost Dauphin. He actually managed to gather supporters despite his erratic behavior, which in the end sent him to a madhouse. In 1828, a more refined pretender appeared, although he still seemed to have a background as a petty criminal. Baron Richemont, as he was called, not only claimed to have been rescued as a child from the Temple Prison by a doctor, but also to have been rescued from other prisons since, for he asserted that he was the two previous pretenders, Hervagault and Bruneau. And after facing further imprisonment for his swindlery, he appears to have escaped again in 1835 to live out the remainder of his life insisting he was Louis XVII.

Then there was Carl Wilhelm Naundorff in Berlin, who began asserting he was the dauphin while Richemont was on trial for his own claims. Naundorff’s claim was laughable in some ways. At first, he didn’t even get the dauphin’s name right when making his claim, and he couldn’t speak a word of French! During his career as a false claimant, he moved to London and wrote very fanciful memoirs detailing multiple substitutions at the Temple prison as well as all the abductions and shipwrecks he had survived. He began to build bombs in London, which may seem odd but isn’t when one considers that previous to making his claims he appears to have been an arsonist. Because of all the accidental explosions and fires in his workshop, he nearly drove his neighbors to riot. After a stint in debtor’s prison, the Dutch government paid him for his bomb design, and he pursued a career as a bomb maker in Holland, where he passed away in 1845, his death certificate bearing the name King Louis XVII.  Although all evidence seems to point to Naundorff being a fraud, he was the most successful of all claimants, inspiring numerous conspiracy theories to explain away problems with his tales, and even rallying a set of parliamentary deputies, the Naundorffists, to his cause during the Third Republic in France. His proponents argued for his legitimacy long after his death.

Naundorff on his deathbed, via Wikimedia Commons.

There have been more than a hundred men claiming to be the long lost dauphin, some of whose claims strained credulity far more than others, such as Eleazar Williams, whose claims were met with skepticism and even outright mockery due to his dark skin and Native American heritage. The claims of all such pretenders suffered from the same inherent flaw; it was hard to credit the idea that the Simons or some other royalist plotter would have been able to smuggle a replacement child into Temple prison, let alone spirit Louis Charles out, when the republican guards scrutinized all objects brought in and out. A perhaps more feasible theory is that, if a substitution had ever taken place, it was with the full cooperation of the officers on duty, perhaps to hide the fact that the dauphin, who remained a valuable political pawn, no longer lived. As we have discussed, he seems to have been quite healthy when he was moved from the care of the Simons into solitary confinement, and the rapid advance of disease in the child who would later die there has led many to believe the dauphin was replaced with a sickly or dying boy. What if this was done to cover up the dauphin’s murder? Some have pointed to a cryptic note of a committee secretary in 1794 indicating a decision had been reached to get rid of the prince as proof that the dauphin’s captors killed him. And furthermore, this may have been the reason for firing Simon and other guards who would have recognized that a substitution had occurred. Or perhaps the guards and even Simon, in an act of extremist republicanism had slain the young royal and had been discharged for their insubordination. Either way, it would have been wise to pretend they still had the prince in custody. One report to corroborate this version comes from 1801, when a prisoner digging in the garden of the Temple uncovered a child’s skeleton that had been buried in quicklime. As the story goes, the prison governor admitted it was the Lost Dauphin’s corpse, but the bones stayed where they lay, and eventually a house was built atop them.

All of these fanciful accounts rely on the idea that sometime just before or after his seclusion in the dungeon, the dauphin was swapped out for some other child, and it was this replacement boy who died in June of 1795. But there is now substantive evidence that that child was indeed the dauphin, for it seems the doctor, Pelletan, upon performing his autopsy, secreted away the child’s heart and preserved it in alcohol. Years later, after the heart had been stolen from him and he eventually regained it, he gave the heart to the archbishop of Paris, who promised to return it to the Lost Dauphin’s remaining family. During a riot in 1830, the archbishop’s home was ransacked, but luckily, the heart was found discarded among the remaining debris. Thereafter, it passed through various hands before finally ending up in an Austrian shrine to the Bourbon dynasty. In 1998, the heart underwent DNA testing, comparing to hair samples from Marie Antoinette as well as blood samples from some descendants of the family. Astonishingly, it revealed that the heart purported to have been preserved at the 1795 autopsy contained mitochondrial DNA identical to that of Marie Antoinette, proving that it belonged to a child related matrilineally to her mother, Empress Maria Theresia. So this would seem the final nail in the coffin of this mystery… but as we always see, there arises reason to doubt almost any seemingly incontrovertible proof. In this case, there is considerable evidence that, back in 1830, when the rioters looted his residence, the archbishop had actually been in possession of more than one preserved royal heart. You see, the hearts of royals were sometimes removed during embalming and kept as relics, and in this case, it seems the archbishop may have had both the heart from Pelletan’s autopsy of the child in the Temple who may or may not have been Louis Charles and the heart of Louis Joseph, the Lost Dauphin’s older brother who had died before the revolution. The possibility then remains that the heart tested for DNA was that of Louis Joseph, another son of Marie Antoinette, mistaken among the wreckage of the archbishop’s house for the heart Pelletan had collected. And as long as that is a possibility, it would seem that science, rather than solving this case, has only created a further mystery.

The organ purported to be the heart of Louis XVII, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Bastard Princes in the Bloody Tower; Part Two, The Skeletons Under the Stairs

This installment is part two of a series on the great historical mystery of the Princes in the Tower, so if you skipped the last one, be sure to go back and read it before continuing. In part one, I established the context of familial struggles for the throne of England that one must be familiar with to get a strong understanding of the goings on leading up to the princes’ disappearance, detailing the back and forth conflict between that Yorkist and Lancastrian branches of the Plantagenet family that we call the War of the Roses, all culminating in the death of Edward IV and his brother Richard’s taking of the throne from Edward’s son on the grounds that Edward’s marriage to the boy’s common-born mother had been illegitimated. In that episode, we also examined the reputation of Richard III that we have inherited, asking whether or not Richard’s memory has been unfairly sullied by propagandists seeking to please Henry Tudor after he had defeated Richard and established the Tudor dynasty. And indeed it does appear that he was the victim of character assassination after his death and perhaps even while he was still alive. We looked at the claims of his deformity and other legends that would make of him a hideous creature, and relying in large part on evaluations made in my principal source, Bertram Fields’ Royal Blood, we discussed accusations that depict Richard as a greedy, power-hungry despot, all of which seem to lack credibility. And there are further accusations that I didn’t even have time to delve into, such as that Richard’s background shows him to be coldly calculating and murderous and therefore proves he had the appetite for so gruesome a task as killing children if it would benefit him. For example, it is claimed by traditionalists that at the Battle of Tewkesbury, Richard personally killed the young Prince of Wales, likely illegitimate son of Lancastrian Queen Margaret and heir apparent to the feeble-minded King Henry VI, and likewise that it was he who murdered Henry VI in the Tower when the old, crazy king was helpless. And some even claim that it was he who executed his own brother, George, Duke of Clarence. Firstly, there is no evidence of Richard having been the one who killed any of these men. And if indeed he personally slew the prince at Tewkesbury, it was in defense of his brother, the king, and likely on royal orders. Likewise, in his role as the constable, he may have overseen the killing of Henry VI at the Tower, but it would surely have been at the king’s request. The same might be said for his brother’s execution, but George had stood trial, and actually all indications point to Richard not wanting to see George killed and resenting the fact that Edward had bent to the pressures of his wife’s family to have their brother killed. Now there was a pernicious rumor that seems to have arisen during his lifetime, toward the end of his brief two-year reign, when his wife Anne Neville passed away, that he had poisoned her so that he could marry his niece, Elizabeth. There appears to be no evidence for the poisoning whatsoever. Richard actually took the odd step of publicly denying these rumors, perhaps because by this time he was already plagued by rumors that he had done away with his nephews in the tower. In fact, it makes no sense that Richard would ever have considered marrying his niece, as she had been made a bastard along with the princes and any other Woodville children of his brother. The only benefit to it would have been to keep her from marrying the pretender Henry Tudor, who he knew was scheming in Brittany to take the throne and might strengthen his claim by marrying Elizabeth and uniting the houses of Lancaster and York. Actually, young Elizabeth does seem to have been amenable to the idea of marriage to her uncle based on letters she is said to have written, but this proves nothing besides the fact that she and the Woodvilles likely didn’t believe the rumors that Richard had killed her brothers. This rumor is the true black mark against him, the accusation that likely bred all the others, and it too showed up before the Tudor accession to the throne. So, finally, we must examine this exceptionally cold case of missing children to come to any clear conclusion on the matter of Richard’s character.

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Richard Plantagenet’s and Anne Neville’s coronation, via Meandering Through Time

After Parliament’s late June declaration that the princes were illegitimate in a document called Titulus Regius, Richard was crowned on July 6th, 1483, and two weeks later departed on his royal progress—kind of a victory tour, if you will. Now there are indications, based on the records of fine cloth being bought for him, that at least one of the princes, the older boy, Edward, was present at the coronation, and the Great Chronicle of London reports that the children had been seen “playing in the Gardyn of the Towyr” more than once during that summer. This may have been before or after Richard had the princes moved to apartments inside the Garden Tower, so called for its access to the garden—a tower that in later years, as I previously mentioned, would be renamed the Bloody Tower after a prominent earl committed suicide there. These sightings that summer appear to be the last time the boys were seen alive, and rumors that the princes had been murdered seem to have arisen as early as July that summer, perhaps even before Richard left on his progress. One contemporary chronicler, Dominic Mancini, an Italian priest who left London in July, brought the gossip back to France, including vague claims that Prince Edward had confided to his physician that he was afraid for his life, although we have other indications that one or both of the princes may have been ill, so these secondhand reports may have been misconstrued. By January the next year the rumor turned into an outright accusation from a bishop in France, and after Easter 1484, the rumor seems to have gained strength in England. And yet, around this time, Elizabeth Woodville and her daughters left sanctuary and appear to have been on friendly terms with King Richard, which would suggest that she must have known or believed that Richard had not harmed her sons. Now, it has been pointed out that, while Richard took the initiative to deny the rumor about his planned marriage to his niece, he kept silent on the far more damaging rumor of the princes’ murder. Why? Perhaps the boys were still alive and the people who mattered knew it. Or if they were dead, it’s also possible that he was not responsible if some other person had done the deed without his knowledge or if the princes had died of natural causes, and Richard may not have wanted the news to get out for fear that it would only exacerbate the rumors of his guilt in the matter. And another possibility is that keeping people guessing was the smart move. After all, the pretender Henry Tudor would rely on his marriage to a daughter of Edward IV to strengthen his claim, but this would only serve his cause if the children of the Woodville marriage were legitimated again, and if the princes were still alive, then their claim would trump his. Therefore, if they were dead, Richard would want Henry to think them alive in order to discourage him, and if they were alive, perhaps Richard had secreted them away for their safety and would prefer that Henry thought them dead, as Henry would seek to eliminate them as well. Thus, whether the princes were dead or alive, Richard would have had good reason not to trumpet the news to the realm.

Indeed, Henry Tudor’s claim to the throne was exceedingly weak. The Tudors had come from the servant class, but Henry’s grandfather had an affair with Katherine of Valois, the widow of Henry V, and after Katherine died, he made unsupported claims that he had secretly married her, which would make their son a legitimate half-brother of Henry VI. This was no claim to the throne, but Henry’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, was of the Lancastrian branch of the Plantagenets, which gave him a bit more standing. In fact, he had been at court during the Lancastrian restoration, but after Tewkesbury had fled the country and ended up shipwrecked on Brittany, where for more than a dozen years he was essentially a prisoner living in comfort, all the while trying to convince the Duke of Brittany to support his claim to the throne. Well, in 1483, while Richard was on his royal progress, the Duke demanded some aid in defending Brittany against the French, and when Richard failed to provide it, the Duke of Brittany did indeed begin to help Henry Tudor plan his invasion. In the subsequent years, while Richard was dealing with rumors and plots against him, a formidable alliance was formed between the Lancastrian supporters of Henry Tudor and the Woodvilles, who must have at least believed at that time that the princes were deceased even if they did not believe Richard responsible, otherwise why support Henry’s claim to the throne? Moreover, a very powerful man now turned against Richard: the first peer of the realm and constable of England, the Duke of Buckingham, a trusted ally to Richard who had been with him at the beginning, riding daringly with Richard into the midst of the Woodville forces to assert Richard’s protectorship. It is odd that Buckingham supported Henry, being that his own claim to the throne was greater and he had no love for the Woodvilles, but he may have had ulterior motives that we’ll examine later. Buckingham coordinated his rebellion with Henry Tudor’s invasion, but Richard put them both down. While Henry escaped, Buckingham donned a disguise and went into hiding but was betrayed for a reward. Brought to Richard’s encampment, he requested an audience with the king, for purportedly he had a hidden blade and planned to leap at Richard and stab him, but Richard refused his request and had him executed for treason.

Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field, by Abraham Cooper, 1825, via Wikimedia Commons

Undeterred and with further support from the French, Henry Tudor landed another invasion in August of 1485. Although Richard took the threat seriously, he seems to have been confident enough in his own martial prowess to believe he would handily defeat Henry’s forces. There were, however, complications based on whose military support Richard believed he could rely on. First was Lord Stanley, whose loyalties were notoriously unreliable, but Richard took charge of Lord Stanley’s son as insurance that Stanley would not play both sides of this conflict, as his family had done before. Then there was the Earl of Northumberland, a powerful man in the North whom Richard believed he could rely on based on his own ties to the North. However, it seems Northumberland may have taken umbrage with Richard’s decision not to award him authority over the region. Thus, at the Battle of Bosworth Field, when Richard had the high ground and was assured victory, his fortune changed suddenly when Northumberland refused to send his forces into the fray at a crucial moment in the battle. Rather than retreating, Richard gave up his high ground and made a bold charge with a hundred knights right into the heart of the opposing army, seeking to punch through their lines and slay Henry Tudor. But in that moment, as they passed in front of Lord Stanley’s troops, the perfidious lord ordered them to attack. Richard III died in that bloody melee, unhorsed and surrounded by his enemies, and all accounts, even those written by his enemies, admit that he fought fiercely to the end. He was the last English monarch to die in battle. When Henry Tudor took the throne as Henry VII, among his first acts were to undo Titulus Regius and marry the newly re-legitimized Woodville daughter, thereby uniting the houses of Lancaster and York and truly ending the War of the Roses once and for all. It is likely, Bertram Fields points out, that he would not have done this unless he knew for a certainty that both the princes were indeed dead and gone; otherwise, he would have been raising their claims above his own. And his bill of attainder months later against Richard, which made cryptic mention of the “shedding of Infants blood” seems to further indicate some knowledge not only of the princes’ death but of Richard’s guilt. This is the era in which the legend or myth of Richard III and his murder of the Princes in the Tower cemented. And it is said that in 1502, some 17 years later, one James Tyrell and another associate, John Dighton, confessed to murdering the princes at Richard III’s request.

The traditionalist account of the murders, based almost entirely on Sir Thomas More’s unfinished history, is supposed to have been derived from what was revealed in Tyrell’s confession. The account is as follows. During Richard’s royal progress in 1483, Richard sent word back to the current constable of the Tower, Sir Robert Brackenbury, to murder the children, but Brackenbury refused. Relieving himself in the privy when he received Brackenbury’s refusal, Richard complained, asking a page whom he could possibly trust for such a task, whereupon the page suggested that James Tyrell would certainly do whatever Richard asked. And so Richard sent Tyrell to Brackenbury with a letter telling the constable to give Tyrell the Tower keys for a night, which Brackenbury did. Tyrell then recruited his horsekeeper, John Dighton, and a jailer by the name of Miles Forest to do the dark deed. At midnight, Forest and Dighton entered the princes’ apartments while they slept and smothered them with their blankets. Thereafter, Tyrell directed them to bury the children at the foot of some stairs. Upon hearing where they had laid them to rest, however, Richard protested that as king’s sons, they must be buried in a more appropriate place and had a priest disinter them and rebury them in a new and secret grave. Quite a detailed account, but is it credible? Needless to say, these letters ordering the murders have never shown up. Moreover, More’s story presents Tyrell as a nobody that earned Richard’s trust by undertaking the murders, but Tyrell had fought at Tewkesbury and been knighted and awarded with substantial lands by Edward IV. Nor was he a stranger to Richard, who had actually fought beside him. And if the account truly were derived entirely from Tyrell and Dighton’s confessions, this presents other problems, for it’s not entirely certain that these confessions were ever actually given. There is no surviving documentation of the confession, and if they were real, it is exceedingly odd that Henry VII didn’t make them immediately public and waited two years to declare Tyrell a traitor and even then only on account of his support of another rebel, not for murdering the young king. There would have been good reason to come forward with such a confession, since Henry had recently dealt with an imposter trying to take the throne on the claim that he was one of the princes. Then there’s the fact that one of the supposed murderers, Dighton, who purportedly confessed as well, was never even punished. If the story is to be believed, Henry VII had evidence that the man had committed regicide and simply let him go. Finally, there’s the fact that these confessions are supposed to have been common knowledge, and yet More and others, like Sir Francis Bacon, indicate that many still doubted that the princes were even dead. I suppose that means the confessions were hard to credit even then.

The Murder of the Princes in the Tower, by James Northcote, 1786, via Wikimedia Commons

And what of these rumors that the children lived? There exists a document accounting for the delivery of clothes to the Tower in March of 1485, received by the footman of “Lord Bastard,” but it is possible that this refers to Richard’s own bastard son. There are other documents dating from July 1484 indicating the presence of children at Richard’s northern estate, so could it be that Richard had the princes smuggled out of the tower and hidden in safety. After all, Sir Francis Bacon wrote of whisperings during Henry VII’s reign that the princes, or at least one prince, had survived and been living in secret. This would jibe well with some other theories involving certain pretenders to the throne that appeared during Henry VII’s reign. The first was Lambert Simnel. This pretender, called Edwardus by his adherents, showed up in Ireland claiming to be the son of George, the Duke of Clarence, even though it was common knowledge that George’s son was being held in the Tower. Moreover, there is reason to believe that George’s son was cognitively disabled, so it is very strange that this pretender’s cause drew the support of the earl of Lincoln and his aunt, Margaret. Margaret was a sister of Edward IV and Richard III, and the earl of Lincoln was her nephew. They would have known, firstly, that this Edwardus was not George’s son, and secondly that George’s son, with his disability, was not fit to be the king. So it has been suggested that this Lambert Simnel, who was taken captive after Henry VII put down his rebellion at the Battle of Stoke in 1487 and revealed to be a young commoner, was just a stalking horse, a false claimant knowingly put forward to gauge the strength of opposition to Henry VII. Thus, if Simnel’s rebellion had succeeded, perhaps the earl of Lincoln could have been placed on the throne in his stead. Oddly, though, at this time, Henry VII sent Elizabeth Woodville, now his mother-in-law, to a convent and took her lands, and the only apparent reason for this seems to be that she supported the cause of Lambert Simnel. But why on earth would she do this when her daughter was queen? One explanation seems to be that perhaps this Edwardus was a stalking horse for one of her sons, not dead after all and come forth to claim his birthright, which Henry Tudor had himself reinstated. Another is that Edwardus was actually her son, Edward V, and rather than being captured was killed at Stoke and replaced by Henry VII with a young commoner to make the uprising look like a total farce.

A few years later, though, yet another pretender to the throne appeared, this one openly claiming to be the younger of the two princes thought to have been killed in the Tower: Prince Richard. What’s more, even though Henry VII claimed that his spies had discovered this pretender was nothing but a commoner named Perkin Warbeck, he dressed the part, he reportedly looked the part of a Plantagenet, he supposedly had intimate knowledge of family matters, and he was able to convince numerous members of European nobility and royalty that he was who he said he was. After Henry rebuffed his invasion and captured him, this pretender supposedly confessed to everything Henry VII had said about him. Thereafter, having failed in two attempts to escape the Tower, he was executed after the manner of a commoner: hanged, drawn and quartered. But as has been seen before, when exploring other topics, the confession is obviously suspect, being that it was surely extracted under coercion or at least the threat of it. What’s more, there are certain inconsistencies in Perkin Warbeck’s confession that may indicate it was fabricated or that he may have inserted falsehoods into it as a signal that the whole thing was false. One inconsistency is that his name is given as Osbeck rather than Warbeck, and there are several additional inconsistencies relating to the pretender’s supposed background and names of family members. Then there is the far-fetched quality of the story the confession tells, for it claims that while in Ireland, two Englishman first mistook him for a Plantagenet and then forced him against his will to learn English in a short amount of time and undertake his imposture as Prince Richard! And while a few years later, Henry would make no effort to bring forth proof of Tyrell’s confession, he did have many copies of Perkin Warbeck’s confession circulated, yet no signed original seems to exist! Bertram Fields outlines a compelling notion that Perkin Warbeck may indeed have been Prince Richard, and that Lambert Simnel, if he wasn’t Richard’s older brother Edward, may have been a stalking horse for the younger prince. He points to a legend passed down in the Tyrell family that James Tyrell, the very man accused of murdering the princes, took them in, along with their mother, with Richard III’s permission. And there is some indication of Richard sending Tyrell on mysterious errands abroad and rewarding him with a large sum of money in late 1484 and early 1485. Therefore, it would seem at least plausible that Richard did indeed make arrangements for the princes to live in secret, away from England, where they grew to be men and eventually returned to reassert their birthright in abortive attempts at overthrowing Henry VII.

Perkin Warbeck in the Pillory, by H. M. Paget, 1884, via Wikimedia Commons

Of course, there is also the possibility that the princes did indeed die in the Tower. Even so, would that necessarily mean they were murdered? There are reports of young Prince Edward expressing fears for his life to his personal physician, but there are also reports that the young prince may have been gravely ill, which would seem to reframe that exchange as the prince expressing his fear of a natural death rather than his fear of being murdered. It’s widely accepted that Prince Edward suffered from osteomyelitis, a chronic condition common in the Middle Ages that involved bone infections. Moreover, Sir Thomas More himself quotes Elizabeth Woodville as saying that the younger Prince Richard was also “sore diseased with sicknes.” So it stands to reason that the poor children, sequestered in their tower apartments, simply passed away from separate illnesses, and Richard did not make this known for a number of reasons. First, with the princes gone, it may have encouraged other claimants to press their causes, as the further impediments to usurpation that the princes may have seemed to be were now gone. Second, the simple truth was that, even if Richard declared how the children had died and produced their bodies for examination, the bare fact of their deaths would only further strengthen the rumors that he had murdered them.

There may be no evidence that the princes survived, but there does appear to be evidence that they died, for in 1674, as workers excavated beneath a staircase in the Tower of London, they uncovered a chest containing two small skeletons. These were presumed to be the remains of the Princes in the Tower and were ceremoniously placed in an urn at Westminster Abbey. In 1933, some scientists were permitted to examine the remains, and their findings would seem to confirm this conclusion. Based on the size of the bones, it was estimated that they were the remains of children of the right age to have been the princes, and the older of the two showed signs of his jawbone having deteriorated due to disease, which would correspond with Edward’s osteomyelitis. Furthermore, both skulls appeared to display hypodontia, or congenitally missing teeth, which would indicate the two were related.

Disposal of the princes in the Tower, via Wikimedia Commons

Case closed, then? If these were the princes, then the very fact that their remains were buried in a chest beneath a staircase not only indicates they were murdered but also seems to confirm Sir Thomas More’s version of the events. However, that’s not exactly true, for according to More’s version, the children’s remains were dug up and reburied elsewhere. Also, the evidence may not be as concrete as it seems. For example, one might argue that the existence of children’s bones in the Tower at all proves it was them, but in fact, 27 years earlier, two other children’s skeletons were discovered laid out on a table in a walled up room. In fact, these had been presumed to be the princes until the second set of skeletons was discovered. Moreover, it has been pointed out that hypodontia may prove the two skeletons were related, but if the remains discovered in a parking lot in 2012 really are that of Richard III, as I mentioned in the last installment, then those remains, which show no signs of hypodontia, may indicate that the skeletons under the stairs were of no relation to him and couldn’t be those of his nephews. Furthermore, Bertram Fields points out that judging age from bone size, as those who studied the bones in the 30s did, is an imperfect proposition at best, considering variation in bone size and the fact that people generally tended to be much smaller in the Middle Ages than the average sizes the scientists relied on. Therefore, we can’t be certain of how old these children were at the time of their deaths, and in this case, that is of the utmost importance.

If these are the remains of the princes, and if they were proven to have died any time after the Battle of Bosworth Field, then the clear suspect is no longer Richard but Henry Tudor, who would have taken control of the boys when he took control of the Tower of London, and as reversing the Titulus Regius and re-legitimizing the offspring of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville was crucial to his plan to marry the princes’ sister and strengthen his own right to rule, they would have been rivals to the throne. If however, the bones were able to prove that the princes were killed before Bosworth, that does not necessarily prove Richard’s guilt either, for there is always the possibility that someone murdered the princes without his approval, perhaps thinking he would approve and reward them. There is a cryptic letter from late July 1483 referring to “certain persons” being held for engaging in an unnamed “enterprise” and awaiting “due execucion of our lawes.” Could this carefully worded letter of Richard’s be referring to the difficult matter of punishing some murderers for a crime that many would likely blame on Richard himself? This is total speculation, of course, but possible, and there are other likely suspects as well. Another candidate Fields puts forth is the Duke of Buckingham. We know that in his rebellion and support of Henry Tudor, he was likely scheming to put himself on the throne, and the princes could have been perceived as standing in the way for him as well. He was lord high constable of England and could have easily entered the Tower and done the deed when Richard was away on his progress. Then he could have spread the rumor that Richard murdered them to undermine Richard’s rule and stir up support for supplanting him with someone else, which of course Buckingham believed should be himself, even if it meant ensuring Henry Tudor died in battle. It’s a solid theory, for it further explains Buckingham’s falling out with Richard and gives a good reason why Richard might have kept the princes’ deaths a secret, since few would believe he was not party to their murder. But it’s just guesswork and not more or less credible than the traditionalist view that Richard had the princes killed himself. Perhaps one day soon the bones will be released again for more modern scientific analysis, and through DNA and modern dating techniques we might determine whether the bones beneath the stairs did indeed belong to the Princes in the Tower and perhaps discover when exactly they were killed, but that still will not prove that Richard III was responsible. Therefore, it seems safe to assert that this will forever remain one of the most intriguing historical mysteries of all time.

Stairs in the White Tower beneath which the bones are said to have been discovered, via Atlas Obscura

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.