The 2012 discovery of Richard III's remains beneath a car park in Leicester has reignited interest in the associated cold case of the disappearance of the king's nephews, Edward V and Richard, Duke of York. Philippa Langley, founder of the Richard III Society's Scottish Branch and organizer of the successful Looking for Richard Project, has outlined the Missing Princes Project on her eponymous website. Langley views this project as a "modern police investigation" in search of new evidence and two books published in 2017 follow this same modus operandi: Matthew Lewis' The Survival of the Princes in the Tower: Murder, Mystery, and Myth and Gerald Prenderghast's Richard III and the Princes in the Tower: The Possible Fates of Edward V and Richard of York. Neither author is a conventional academic scholar of late medieval England, although several such scholars have taken a turn at unravelling the mystery with inconclusive results, including A. J. Pollard (1997) and Michael Hicks (2003). Prenderghast's previous two publications are on the subject of military history and include Britain in the Wars in Vietnam: The Supply of Troops, Arms, and Intelligence, 1945-1974. This review, however, considers his book on the "princes in the Tower."
Prenderghast concedes that there is little need for another theory regarding the fate of Richard's nephews, and so his book is not an account of the events of the king's reign nor a study of his much-maligned character. Rather Prenderghast aims to treat the fate of the Princes as an investigation dependent on hard facts with the intention of pressing forward the discovery of new evidence. Richard III and the Princes in the Tower unfolds over seventeen brief chapters as a sharp police procedural, without pause for speculation or overwrought narrative, and will appeal to the reader who wants to know exactly what is known, not what is conjectured.
The book is divided into four sections, framed by a brief preface, an introduction, and several helpful appendices at the end. Section I, containing chapters 1-3, takes up events with the death of Edward IV and Richard's transition from protector of Edward V to king in his own right. Prenderghast includes the first three of twelve tables in chapter two, these detailing what is known about the participants in the October Rebellion (1483), including whether the participants were literate or not and therefore might have left some heretofore undiscovered written evidence. Section II, chapters 4-6, focuses on the daily life of the boys, suggesting the prevalence of infectious disease in childhood and identifying all who had contact with Edward V, including the members of Edward V's councils. Section III, chapters 7-9, gets to the heart of the matter by examining the evidence to support three possible solutions to the mystery of the Princes' fate: death by natural causes, murder, and escape from the Tower. Section IV, chapters 10-17, further considers the likelihood that there must have at one time existed written evidence regarding the Princes' whereabouts, left by Richard's associates, the participants in the thwarted July Rescue of the Princes, or the October rebels.
Prenderghast's book is a clearly written statement of all the evidence we possess and a reasoned argument for the case to remain open until further evidence is found. Prenderghast views Richard as a master of careful planning up to his coronation in July. Though Richard is undeniably "capable of this pair of very convenient murders" (199), Prenderghast wonders why Richard would jeopardize all he had gained by exposing himself to blame and not attempting to clear himself of the rumors and accusations. It is Richard's silence regarding the Princes that is Prenderghast's strongest argument for Richard's possible innocence. However, in a period where political action and political violence were often shaped by rumor and gossip, perhaps Richard knew that silence was the only way forward until the matter of legitimacy could be settled on the battlefield. This is also a book with a culprit of a different sort: Sir Thomas More, author of TheHistory of King Richard the Thirde, who fingers Sir James Tyrell for the Princes' murder--More's sixteenth-century history is the first to mention Tyrell's confession, a document never found. Prenderghast includes More's account in appendix 4. Sir James Tyrell figures prominently in Prenderghast's strongest hypothesis regarding Richard's innocence, for Prenderghast suggests an alternate but plausible version of events, which has Tyrell secreting away the Princes at Gipping Hall and from there possibly escaping to Ireland or elsewhere after Richard's defeat at Bosworth. Prenderghast suggests the Princes would have had to remain in hiding once Henry Tudor took the throne but admits that without further documentary evidence this is impossible to demonstrate. Even Prenderghast cannot resist playing out possible scenarios, though he does so with admirable restraint.
In actual fact, an "All we want are the facts, ma'am" approach to the Princes in the Tower has always been something of a strange choice. Whatever their fates, the Princes remain alive to us because they are a perfect subject for the historical imagination--be it the imagination of William Shakespeare, Josephine Tey, or Sharon Kay Penman. Why? Because Edward V and Richard, Duke of York, ages twelve and nine, were mere children. Even late-fifteenth-century England--which seems to have been able to digest the cruelty of the battles of Towton and Bosworth, where enemy bodies were subject to graphic violence after the deathblow--could not countenance childhood deliberately cut short, be it for political gain or otherwise. Thus even this fact-based treatment of the past is an attempt to rescue the boys from a fate we prefer not to contemplate, but perhaps the possible motives of the uncle who brings his two nephews to the Tower under the pretense of their safe-keeping are better apprehended by the truth of historical fiction.