Category: Charles II

'A Proclamation for the Apprehension of Charles Stuart

12/1/2016

This fourteen by nineteen inch poster recently sold at auction for £33,000, it is a wanted poster, printed in black ink on a single leaf of paper. It is three hundred and sixty one years old and is in almost mint condition. This rare wanted poster, is a demand for the capture of King Charles II, it offers a £1,000 reward for the Kings capture which is equivalent to £75,000 in today's money.

At the top of the poster we can read the powerful words:

'A PROCLAMATION for the Discovery and Apprehending of CHARLS STUART and other Traytors his Addherents and Abettors.' It was issued on Wednesday 10th September 1651 and calls upon 'all Officers, as well Civil as Military, and all other good people of this nation' to make a 'diligent search' for the king." and warns if anyone 'knowingly Conceal the laid Charls Stuart' they will be held as 'partakers and Abbettors of their Trayterous and wicked practices'.

The poster was issued by Oliver Cromwell, the victor of the Battle of Worcester on the 3rd October, in response to the king fleeing on horse back and later famously hiding an oak tree at Boscable Staffordshire. Charles evaded Cromwell's forces and with the aid of Catholic nobles he made his way to the coast and escaped to France. Auctioneer Richard Westwood Brookes said

"This item represents a slice of history that could have ended our monarchy and entirely changed the constitution of our country and an extremely rare item of great historic importance." he continued 'I have only ever seen one other similar poster and that was 40 years ago.To obtain such an important document produced when the King of England was held as a fugitive is extremely rare. Very few items capture a moment in history quite as well as this - it truly is the world's most famous wanted poster."

Had the King been caught at the time, he would have been executed and we would no longer have a monarchy.

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1674: The Remains of the "Princes in the Tower"

9/2/2015

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When ever the subject of the Princes in the Tower comes up, there are always lots of interesting responses regarding the find of skeletal remains of two children under a set of steps in the Tower of London which many still consider to be that of the two sons of Edward IV who disappeared in 1483.

These remains eventually ended up in an urn in Westminster Abbey with the following inscription

'Here lie interred the remains of Edward V King of England, and Richard, Duke of York, whose long desired and much sought after bones, after above an hundred and ninety years, were found by most certain tokens, deep interred under the rubbish of the stairs that led up to the Chapel of the White Tower, on the 17th of July in the year of our Lord 1674. Charles the second, a most merciful prince, having compassion upon their hard fortune, performed the funeral rites of these most unhappy princes among the tombs of their ancestors, anno domini 1678.'

But it is the remains found under a stair case by workmen in 1674 that are still thought to be that of the two princes Edward and Richard of Shrewsbury.

Why is that?

What is interesting is the intense focus on this set of remains, they are only one, among a number of children's remains, that have been found in the Tower of London over the years that are said to be of Edward and Richard. Others include remains found when Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower, remains found when the tower's moat was drained in the mid nineteenth century and in 1789 the two small child size coffins that were found walled up in a 'hidden space' next to the vault holding the coffins of Edward V and his Elizabeth his queen.

The real answer to this question is quite simple and pretty straight forward.
Sir Thomas More's in his The History of Richard III says it was so.

More writes

....."About midnight (the sely children lying in their beddes) came into the chamber, and sodainly lapped them vp among the clothes so be wrapped them and entangled them keping down by force the fetherbed and pillowes hard vnto their mouthes, that within a while smored and stifled, theyr breath failing, thei gaue vp to god their innocent soules into the ioyes of heauen, leauing to the tormentors their bodyes dead in the bed."

but here's the interesting bit......

..... "Whiche after that the wretches parceiued, first by the strugling with the paines of death, and after long lying styll, to be throughly dead: they laide their bodies naked out vppon the bed, and fetched sir Iames to see them. Which vpon the sight of them, caused those murtherers........... to burye them at the stayre foote, metely depe in the grounde vnder a great heape of stones....... Than rode sir Iames in geat haste to king Richarde, and shewed him al the maner of the murther, who gaue hym gret thanks."

Thomas More is not only responsible for the fact that Charles II and everybody else considers these remains to be that of the two princes but that King Richard III from then on was the princes murderer.

The 'story' that the remains are of Edward and Richard, stems partly from the work of Professor William Wright and Dr George Northcroft who published their findings in ‘The Sons of Edward IV. A re-examination of the evidence on their deaths and on the Bones in Westminster Abbey’ This work ought be treated with caution, DNA aside, I wonder how it can be suggested that they were, in life, the princes, if they never established the sex of the skeletons? In 1986 it was pointed out that a couple of important facts from the study were not mentioned. Firstly, there were indications in "existing and unerupted teeth" that suggested that one of the skeletons was a female and secondly the age gap between the two remains were less than three years of the princes.

IF these two boys they met their deaths at the Tower, who in their right minds would place the bodies under the noses of all who were in the present at the time, without being seen and within a limited time frame? Others feel the same, suggesting there were better ways to get rid of the bodies than to hide them somewhere in the Tower itself.

I don't know why More wrote what is written here, or what his motives were, I don't know what happened to the two princes in the summer of 1483, they may well have been murdered, but equally they might not have been.

What I do know is that it has never been proved that the two sons of Edward IV were dead at all.

I also don't believe it is their remains at Westminster Abbey.

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'A Proclamation for the Apprehension of Charles Stuart

1674: The Remains of the "Princes in the Tower"

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