Medicine: Princely Bones

A tragedy of England’s 18th Century Wars of the Roses, resurrected by expert anatomists, last week again aroused the world’s pity.

1483. Two tall, slim, blond young brothers are sleeping in the thick-walled Tower of London. The elder, newly crowned King Edward V of England and titular head of England’s contentious royal House of York, sleeps restlessly. His diseased teeth ache and he has been crying. Young King Edward’s companion, his younger brother, Richard Duke of York, has been crying no less.

Into the bedroom tiptoe two stealthy men. Miles Forrest and John Dighton. husky hirelings, heap the bedclothes over the boys’ heads. Edward manages to fight free for a moment, get a bloody clout in the face. Squirming and kicking, the boys die under the smothering hands. Sir James Tyrrell, a discontented gentleman in charge of the job, hastens to report to his employer, Richard Duke of Gloucester, uncle of the boys. Gloucester, a crafty, ruthless, sharp-featured scoundrel who drags a foot is already calling himself King Richard III.

The chaplain of the Tower has the smothered brothers carried across the courtyard to the White (because occasionally whitewashed) Tower and with a prayer has them buried under the winding staircase.

1485. Bloody Richard III dies on Bosworth Field crying: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” Henry Tudor, distant cousin of the last Lancastrian, King Henry VI, returns from exile, wins on Bosworth Field and marries Elizabeth, sister of the murdered York princes. Thus Henry Tudor merges the Houses of York and Lancaster, ends the Wars of the Roses, establishes his own House of Tudor. Many of his subjects believe that the York princes are still alive, that they somehow escaped from Richard Ill’s confinement. But they do not reappear on the English scene. A century later, a Tudor admirer, William Shakespeare, in his Richard III, fixes the murders on the York blackguard.

1674. Workmen, repairing the winding staircase of the White Tower, exhume some bones, throw them on a rubbish heap. Someone tells King Charles II, a sentimentalist, that the bones must be those of the murdered “Little Princes.” He orders all the princely bones which can be recovered put in an urn. The sealed urn goes to Westminster Abbey to be kept with the dust of other English royalty.

1933. The old scandal is revived. Anatomists tell King George V that their science can tell the exact age of human bones and therefore the exact year the princes were murdered. King George authorizes them to open the urn.

June 1933. The funeral urn is secretly opened in the presence of reliable dignitaries—Berkeley George Andrew Moynihan, Lord Moynihan. president of the Royal College of Surgeons; Professor William Wright, president of the Anatomical Society; William Foxley Norris, dean of Westminster and of the Most Honorable Order of the Bath; Sir Edward Knapp-Fisher, chapter clerk of Westminster Abbey; and Lawrence Edward Tanner, keeper of muniments of Westminster Abbey.

While the others watch, Professor Wright and Mr. Tanner for five secret days carefully, gently and awfully measure each & every princely bone. They photograph them, wrap them in finest lawn. Dean Norris replaces the bones in the urn with a statement on parchment of what has been done in June 1933. The Dean reads part of the Anglican burial service. The urn is resealed and replaced in its niche in Westminster Abbey. King George gets a confidential report, which he permits Anatomist Wright and Muniment-Keeper Tanner to reveal—

Last week, before London’s Society of Antiquaries. King Edward V had been 4 ft. 9 in. tall, his brother 4 ft. 6½ in. (Their father King Edward IV had been 6 ft. 3 in.) Edward had had bad teeth. A blood stain across his face bones indicated that he had been clouted severely before dying.

The lacrimal bone, smallest and most fragile of the face, of one of the boys was abnormal, suggesting, said Professor Wright, that he had ”cried his eyes out.”

The structure and chemistry of the bones proved that when they were murdered Edward was very close to 12 years 9 months, Richard very close to 9 years 10 months. That meant that they had died in 1483, proved conclusively that their murderer was their York uncle Richard III, not, as some modern theorists have suggested, their sister’s Tudor husband Henry VII.

Repercussion. Last week’s revelations vexed English Roman Catholics. Cried Most Reverend Richard Downey, Archbishop of Liverpool: “It is difficult to see what moral justification there can be for reading a Protestant service over the remains of these Roman Catholic princes, even though it were done on the plea of legal continuity of the present Anglican Church with the pre-Reformation Church of Britain.”