The Princes in the Tower: New Evidence
Was dastardly Uncle Richard an innocent victim of Tudor propaganda?
A documentary well worth watching is the Channel 4 documentary, The Princes in the Tower: The New Evidence (UK viewers). It tackles that hoary old problem known from our school days: what happened to the two princes locked away in the Tower of London? For 500 years history has concluded that they were probably murdered by their wicked uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who went on to be crowned Richard III in 1483. But the operative word is probably. No compelling evidence has been produced that proves the allegation against Richard. The purpose of the documentary was to change the word probably to unlikely.
Champion of the cause to prove Richard’s innocence is Philippa Langley. She is the amateur historian whose painstaking work managed to locate the final resting place of King Richard beneath a car park in Leicester. I would recommend the movie The Lost King that dramatises the events surrounding this extraordinary investigation. Langley has always been a cheerleader for Richard. Her common refrain is to denounce the bad stuff we’ve been told about him as nothing more than Tudor propaganda. Much of the popular image we have of Richard, with his historically inaccurate hunchback and withered arm, has come from the pen of Shakespeare. The…
