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Miles Forest and the Fate of the Missing Princes

Five hundred years after Edward V and his brother, Richard duke of York, disappeared, their fate is once again headline news. What do the latest revelations really add to what we already know?

Professor Tim Thornton of the University of Huddersfield has been examining the connections of Sir Thomas More, creator of the most famous account of the deaths of the princes in the Tower. He has uncovered hitherto unrecognised links between More and the sons of one of the men accused of the murder: Miles Forest. According to Thomas More’s story, Forest was one of those charged by Richard III to look after the princes. When Richard decided he needed the boys dead, his servant, Sir James Tyrell, recruited Forest and his own horse-keeper, John Dighton, to assist him in smothering the boys in their beds.

Thornton’s new evidence indicates that Thomas More encountered Forest’s sons, Edward and Miles, in the course of conducting royal business. Consequently, Thornton speculates that it was these two men who had told More the truth about the princes’ fate. More himself described his source only as ‘them that much knew and litle cause had to lye’. The sons of a murderer might perhaps fit that description, he suggests.

But does this evidence justify the conclusion that Richard had ordered the murder of the princes? A deeper look at the evidence would seem to suggest otherwise. Back in 1879 James Gairdner identified Miles Forest as the keeper of the wardrobe at Richard's home of Barnard Castle. According to More, after committing the murder, Forest had ‘at sainct Marten pecemele rotted away’. He gives no date for this, but we know that his widow, Joan, was granted an annuity on 9 September 1484, so Forest clearly died sometime before Richard. Why would a man who had conducted such an important task for the king find himself resourceless in the sanctuary at St Martin’s just months later? It is hard to fathom. No sanctuary register survives so we only have More's word that Forest died in these circumstances. Because More is vague about the date most readers would assume that it was under a Tudor king that Forest died: the idea of Forest 'rotting' in sanctuary during Henry VII's reign because he was a murderer makes some sense. Knowing as we do that Forest really died in Richard's reign, the story is less credible.

If Forest really did die in sanctuary, it might be reasonable to ask why the king felt obliged to give his widow an annuity. It was actually a commonplace of good kingship that if a woman was unfortunate enough to find herself the widow of a felon then she was deserving of charity and should not be made to suffer for her husband’s sins. But we must remember, there is no evidence outside More's story that Forest died in disgrace. The annuity is more likely simply a recognition of Forest's good service at Barnard Castle and indeed Joan's in supporting him.

Forest’s death in 1484 must also have meant that his own boys were far too young for him to have told them of his crime himself. Would their mother have told them? I am well aware of the strong bonds and influence to be found between widowed mothers and their sons, and of mothers' important role in passing on family history, having written so much on Richard III's own mother. But I am not convinced any mother would choose to burden her children with the knowledge that their father had committed the crime of the century. 

Another credibility issue with Thornton's thesis lies in the idea that the Forest brothers would have chosen to reveal this terrible family secret to a man they occasionally met through their work. Henry VIII was reputedly devoted to his mother - what might befall the family of a man known to have murdered her brother? Given that Edward Forest was one of Henry VIII's Grooms of the Chamber and the younger Miles was in Cardinal Wolsey's employ, it would have been a wildly risky step to make.

And what of the other alleged murderers? More claimed that Tyrell and Dighton were both examined and confessed to the murder during Henry VII’s reign. Tyrell was executed but Dighton ‘yet walketh on a live’. Again More’s story is hard to credit here. Dighton confessed to such a murder but was simply allowed to walk free? Unfortunately it is impossible to trace Dighton for certain in other records, but clearly at the time More first drafted his work he had in mind someone he knew was still alive and at liberty.

Tyrell was indeed executed in Henry VII’s reign and, as Thornton notes, More was not the first to accuse him of killing the princes. Yet we have no record that any public statement was made of his guilt at the time of his execution which was for an unrelated charge of treason. His alleged confession does not itself survive.

Time and again in More’s work, we find scraps of truth woven together with plausible names, details no one could have recalled and entertaining direct speech. This makes for a vivid picture but frequently contradicts contemporary evidence (for instance in the controversy around Edward IV's wedding). What we know of More’s work must prompt the question: Was More really reporting what the Forest boys had told him, or was it just that his acquaintance with them had caused him to learn that their father had been a servant of Richard’s which made Miles Forest a convenient name in More's story. 

The fate of the princes is one of the most tantalising gaps in our knowledge of the past. At first sight, More’s novel-like explanation offers an attractively detailed picture to plug that gap. Little wonder so many are eager to believe it. Unfortunately, there are just too many elements that strain credulity or do not fit with what else is known. More's saintly reputation (hair shirt and all) has inevitably made generations of historians unwilling to imagine he was deliberately peddling falsehoods - but that is to assume More expected his readers to receive his work as soberly factual history. Since he never finished the work we cannot be sure what his intentions were, but anyone who has read his famous Utopia will be aware that More enjoyed using fiction under a veneer of plausible facts to explore political ideas.

Thomas More’s connections with the Forest boys are certainly worth adding to our investigation of all available evidence, but as yet they provide no new lead on the fate of the missing princes.

Image: 

British Library Royal 16 II f. 73 The Tower of London

Sources:

Tim Thornton, “More on a Murder: The Deaths of the ‘Princes in the Tower’, and Historiographical Implications for the Regimes of Henry VII and Henry VIII”, History, 2020.

The Complete Works of St Thomas More, ed. Richard S. Sylvester (Yale University Press, 1963) vol. 2.

http://ricardianresources.online/downloads/Vol_2_pp1-230.pdf p. 160

Richard III’s Lavish Christmas?

Shortly before Christmas, The Telegraph published an article on Richard III’s Christmas gifts. It mentioned that Richard ordered his Exchequer to pay £100 in ready money to the grooms and pages of his chamber at Christmas 1483. This is almost £70,000 in today’s money. Moreover, in the new year Richard settled a bill with a London goldsmith for Christmas gifts and other jewels worth the equivalent of £500,000 today. The article speculated that Richard’s lavish generosity was an attempt to secure the loyalty of the court after the recent rebellion against his rule. Nonetheless, the headline was an unusually positive one for Richard: “Not so much winter discontent in court of generous Richard III”.

Research currently being undertaken for the Society, thanks to a bequest from Pauline Stevenson, sheds significantly more light on this. The source for this expenditure is a collection of documents at The National Archives. Indeed, the Telegraph’s article was prompted by a Tweet about them from TNA. The documents in question are known as Warrants for Issues. Scholars have been using them for decades but hitherto they have not been published, other than a few details in the List and Index of Warrants for Issues. The Society has begun creating detailed calendars of these documents, starting with the period 1480-85. The plan is eventually to include all of Edward IV’s reign as well. From the work done so far, it is clear that there was nothing exceptional in Richard’s payment to his grooms and pages. His goldsmith’s bill, however, may have been unusually high.

On 10 December 1481, a warrant for Edward IV’s exchequer noted “it has been accustomed that the king’s servants, the grooms and pages of the king’s chamber, should have yearly of the king’s gift and reward against the feast of Christmas the sum of £100 in money” (E 404/77/2/39). On 13 November 1482 the same wording was used in another payment to the grooms and pages (E 404/77/2/54). So Richard III was merely following accepted practice when he paid his grooms and pages £100.

According to the Black Book of Edward IV’s Household, there should be ten grooms and four pages of the king’s chamber. Like other grooms and pages of the household, they were provided with lodging, food and clothing as part of their job. They were also given a quarterly allowance. Pages received 20d and grooms either 40d or 6s 8d, depending on how much clothing they received. The Black Book notes that, besides this quarterly income that was provided by the counting house, they should also receive “the great reward given yearly from the King’s privy coffers to the grooms and pages of his chamber”.[1] This Christmas bonus, it seems, was essentially part of their regular income but it clearly made the grooms and pages of the king’s chamber far better paid than those elsewhere in the household. It is likely that the grooms’ individual share of the £100 was greater than the pages’, probably £8 6s 8d for the grooms and half that for the pages.  According to the National Archives’ Currency Converter, the modern equivalent of the grooms’ bonus would be £5,760. It was twelve times as much as they received from the counting house in the course of the rest of the year. It was certainly a generous gift but its only political significance in 1483 is that it demonstrates Richard III following his brother’s policies.

The payment to a London goldsmith might be more interesting. On 22 January 1484 instructions were sent to pay Edmund Shawe, goldsmith, “the sum of £764 17s 6d as well for certain plate by him ordained for the king’s year’s gifts against Christmas last past, and for other jewels by him ordained and delivered to the king’s own hands” (E 404/78/2/28). Edmund Shawe was of course mayor of London the previous summer, during Richard’s accesson, and it was his brother, Ralph, who had preached the famous sermon declaring that Edward IV’s sons were bastards.

Edmund Shawe had been engraver of the royal mint from 1462-82 and loaned Edward IV money on occasion. According to BL MS Harley 433 (digitised by the Society here), Shawe also lent Richard III 400 marks early in his reign, and Richard had spent £134 on New Year gifts purchased from Shawe in December 1482. John Stow recorded that in December 1483 Richard sold some of his own silver and gilt plate to Shawe for just over £550. This was perhaps to acquire some of the funds necessary for a lavish Christmas.

Unfortunately it is impossible to know how much of the £764 spent by Richard in 1483/4 was for Christmas gifts and what was for jewels for the king himself (and perhaps his queen). This makes it difficult to judge how unusual it was. It may just possibly be significant that Richard arranged for the Receiver of Fee Farms to pay £431 10s 10d out of the total owed to Shawe (according to BL Harley 433). It could be that this was the amount actually spent on Christmas gifts, in which case it would again appear to reflect standard practice. Two years previously, in February 1482, Edward IV had paid £464 17s 3d to John Shawe (nephew to Edmund and Ralph) for ‘year’s gifts’ that included a gold cup costing more than £45, a gold cross set with diamonds, and four diamond rings (E 404/77/2/54).

In conclusion, it could be that Richard III’s gift giving at Christmas 1483 was more generous than his brother’s had been, but at present we simply cannot say. Both kings were lavish in their gift giving as befitted the medieval concept of a good prince.

J. L. Laynesmith

Image: Hastings Hours BL Add MS 54782 f. 42v

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[1] The Black Book was probably in part an ideal rather than a wholly accurate reflection of practice, so it is impossible at present to be sure whether the £100 was originally a gift that came from the privy purse which Edward IV later started taking directly from the Exchequer. It may be that the compiler of the Black Book simply thought it ought to come from the privy purse.