The fate of the princes: Cartesian anxiety and narrative closure in Thomas More’s History of Richard III

The curious similarity between England’s last medieval king and one of the early martyrs of Henry VIII’s reign lies in their afterlives. Both King Richard III and Sir Thomas More have been claimed by disparate spaces and communities. Few Renaissance figures belong simultaneously to literary scholars, theologians, lawyers, philosophers and historians, as More does. Richard III is likewise claimed by the Ricardians who defend him, by historians, Shakespearean scholars, actors, scientists, and a British public fascinated by monarchy. Both men are defined in the public mind by plays: Shakespeare’s tragedy, and Bolt’s biographical hagiography. The two men remain bound together by More’s History of Richard III (History). Richard III remains a historical person whose life and reputation are still contested. More’s unfinished and unpublished History is also contested. It is ephemeral and difficult to define. History, rhetoric, political treatise, drama, or some combination of them all? While Morean scholars explore the generic complexities of the History, historians still attempt to determine whether More intended the work for publication as a conventional history. What I want to explore here is why historians, in particular, have found it so difficult to settle what More’s History actually is.

I want to introduce the idea of Cartesian anxiety into this argument. Richard J. Bernstein, who brought the term into philosophical discussion, described it as a ‘quest for some fixed point, some stable rock upon which we can secure our lives against the vicissitudes that constantly threaten us’.¹ In historical research, this anxiety emerges as a fear of uncertainty: a desire to establish a stable foundation for knowledge and to resolve questions that the surviving evidence may not permit us to answer conclusively. I do not mean to imply that this anxiety is purely epistemological. Historical uncertainty may also be normatively unsettling when it concerns the apparent murder of two children. Here, the desire to know what happened may become inseparable from the desire to identify a perpetrator, assign guilt, and reach a morally satisfying verdict. As such, Cartesian anxiety is particularly evident in historical discussions of Richard III and in historians’ attempts to determine what kind of work More’s History is, because at the centre of both debates lies a historical mystery that has never been resolved. Early in Richard III’s reign, the uncrowned twelve-year-old King Edward V and his nine-year-old brother, Richard, Duke of York, having been declared illegitimate and excluded from the succession, vanished from the face of the earth.

While their disappearance has become less a question about the fate of two children than a battleground over whether Richard III should be demonised or redeemed, an affective investment underlies both popular and scholarly attempts to resolve it. We are not mourning the children themselves. We are mourning the absence of certainty. The language through which they are remembered testifies to this displacement. Edward and Richard are rarely treated as named individuals, instead they are popularly subsumed into the collective epithet ‘the Princes in the Tower’, transformed from two individual children into a historical puzzle. Arguments about their fate can appear distinctly detached, treating the children as evidence to be arranged in the prosecution or defence of Richard III, rather than as persons whose identities, experiences, and eventual fate remain unresolved. Here, Cartesian anxiety is driven by the fact that we have no extant evidence that Richard III organised the murder of his nephews. Nor do we even have evidence of their deaths. Therefore, despite the appearance of detached debate, this anxiety produces an affective investment in positivist proof: the hope that one newly discovered fact, document, or scientific result might finally reveal both the fate of the children and the character of Richard III.

This brings us back to More’s History, which, I think, has been a more important document to later scholars than it was to More himself. More abandoned the text seventeen years before his death, and we have no evidence that he intended to finish it. Further, Richard S. Sylvester suggests that More was reluctant to publish the text, because he was ‘perhaps no longer sure which lesson Henry VIII might read in its pages’.². In keeping with its elusiveness, the History accommodates a significant plurality of interpretations. It has been read as an exemplum, rhetorical exercise, satirical drama, political treatise, humanist history and pedagogical tool, without any single interpretation fully resolving its instability. Against the conventional view of the History as the fixed Tudor image of Richard III, Morean scholars have increasingly emphasised its narrative disruptions, inconsistent characterisation, uncertain treatment of sources, and faulty chronology to explore its generic instability.³ Historians, on the other hand, focus on these same issues to assess its value as a historical document. While More did indeed have access to people who had lived through Richard III’s reign, the purpose of the work can only be conjectured. It can nevertheless be safely suggested that More was writing for and engaging with his own readers, prompting them to consider how to interpret his narrative, rather than leaving behind a historical record from which the truth might later be recovered. More’s History should consequently be examined as a constructed narrative, a historical artefact, before it is treated as evidence capable of resolving the fate of the children.

Historians make a conscious decision to engage substantially with More’s History. Hayden White has described the historian’s decision making process as the ‘prefigurement’ stage of historical research, where the historian selects what will be treated as significant evidence. White describes this initial selection of evidence as a ‘poetic’ process of prefigurement; I have elsewhere described it as intuitive. What historians recognise as significant is shaped by their own concerns and motivations.⁴ In the case of Richard III, historians may approach More’s narrative having already accepted Richard III’s responsibility for the disappearance of his nephews. More is therefore not always employed to determine whether Richard was guilty, but to validate a conclusion already reached. To engage with More’s History as a historical document is therefore to grant authority to an unstable text because it somehow addresses the individual historian’s concerns. Even Paul Murray Kendall, who wrote the definitive sympathetic narrative of Richard III in 1955, leans on More when convenient.⁵ But where we may have difficulty discerning invention from truth elsewhere in the History, the account of the fate of Edward V and Richard, Duke of York, is very obviously a narrative construction.

More begins by telling us that just as Richard III ended his reign with his own deserved death, he began his reign with the most ‘piteous and wicked’ deaths of his nephews, ordering Sir James Tyrrell to organise the murders of the children. More then names Miles Forest and John Dighton, who enter the children’s chamber at midnight, suffocating them with their bedding. Edward and Richard’s bodies are then presented to Tyrrell before they are buried beneath a heap of stones at the foot of a staircase. More then claims that the bodies were moved by a priest to an unknown location after Richard III had a fit of conscience. The most important part of the narrative, however, rests in More’s representation of the subsequent fates of those involved. Each receives a divine punishment, and, as More tells us, ‘God never gave this world a more notable example’: Forest ‘rotted away’, Dighton remained alive but was expected to be hanged, Tyrrell was beheaded for treason, and Richard III was killed at Bosworth less than three years later. More also claims that Tyrrell and Dighton eventually confessed to the murder, although neither could identify where the bodies had been reburied.⁶

More tells us how he created this narrative, both by his frequent use of qualifiers, and how he describes his sources. More begins by reminding us that some were still doubtful that the children were killed during Richard III’s reign. He cautions that he is not transcribing every story he has heard, but has chosen those that he thinks are most reliable. More then writes a narrative of Edward and Richard’s alleged murder, before he reaches the description of their burial. The story of Richard III not allowing ‘the burying in so vile a corner, saying that he would have them buried in a better place, because they were a King’s sons’ was apparently relayed to More, and he notes that ‘they say’ that the children were disinterred and buried in a secret place. This hearsay or anecdotal evidence alone casts doubt on the event happening—More’s framing of the narrative as a moral lesson in which providential justice for all is duly served indicates the kind of deliberate narrative structure incompatible with historical truth. More presents us with a set-up, a conflict, motives, rising action, the working out of a plot, the climactic murder scene, and a denouement, ending in divine justice. It is a salacious narrative, not a factual retelling of history.

It is the completeness of More’s narrative that is key to its authority. Tim Thornton, who has published a series of papers on the fate of Edward and Richard since 2020, argues that historians have placed too much emphasis on the dramatic qualities of the History, and prioritises its value as a historical document. Thornton’s description of More’s work as ‘the first conventional account of the murders’ is revealing.⁷. I suggest that it is precisely this factor, that More constructed a full narrative, that draws historians to the text despite its instability. As Hayden White argues, narrative closure produces moral meaning by arranging events as elements within a coherent moral drama, giving them significance through the authority of the narrator.⁸ More’s authority therefore lies not in the certainty of his evidence, but in his ability to transform uncertain material into a complete and morally coherent account.

More’s access to oral testimony contributes to the appearance of historical authority surrounding the History. Sylvester identifies Cardinal John Morton, a royal councillor under Edward IV and later Bishop of Ely, as the most likely principal source for More’s account. He also identifies More’s father, other well-informed contemporaries, oral traditions circulating within court, legal, and London circles, and possible written materials available to him.⁹ However, there is no way of knowing which source supplied any particular piece of information. Thus, when Desmond Seward counters the equally dubious idea that the children were buried by digging ten feet into solid stone with the suggestion that they may instead have been interred by tunnelling sideways into rubble beneath an external staircase, we witness the kind of credulity-stretching argument produced by affective investment.¹⁰ Seward, a popular historian, describes his own affective connection to Richard III that began with a passionate childhood belief in his innocence, persisted through successive attempts to reconcile More’s account with alternative explanations, and ended only when his reading of contemporary sources convinced him of Richard III’s guilt. Seward, to his credit, calls the book a very personal interpretation.¹¹ Seward’s account therefore clearly demonstrates how historians’ interpretive choices may be shaped by their motivations and affective investments. But the problem is not historians approaching Richard III with prior motivations. The problem arises when the traditional villainous interpretation of Richard III is treated as inherently scholarly, while attempts to question it are dismissed as unacademic.

If it is ‘fundamentally unacademic’ to try to exonerate Richard III of the accusation of infanticide, it must be equally ‘unacademic’ to try to prove that he was responsible.¹² Both approaches are simply quests for further evidence. I do not think that sufficient evidence will ever be uncovered either way, and whoever arranged for the children to disappear more than five centuries ago, if that is what happened, appears to have ensured that no trace remained. But gatekeeping particular interpretations runs contrary to the principles of historical enquiry. Disagreement alone is generally not grounds for declaring the question itself illegitimate. An argument should be judged on its merits, not by whether its conclusion conforms to an established scholarly position. This kind of gatekeeping merely demonstrates that debate around Richard III invariably becomes affective: certain conclusions are treated not simply as more or less persuasive, but as morally or intellectually permissible, while others are dismissed in advance as illegitimate.

This leaves us, in the end, with our feelings. The Cartesian anxiety surrounding the disappearance of Edward and Richard is not just anchored in the human need for truth, but in the grief produced by its absence. More’s narrative fills that absence with meaning and justice. Perhaps the more difficult task for historians is not to recover a definitive answer to the fate of two children after more than five centuries, but to reconcile with the uncertainty that the surviving evidence leaves behind.