Royal Murder Page 19

  Following this Henry Tudor announced that Tyrell had confessed to a part in the murder of the princes although no document of confession was ever produced. Henry’s account of this confession which was quoted by various Tudor historians and has been taken as fact ever since, stated that when Richard III was on a royal progress following his coronation in August, 1483, he sent a message to Sir Robert Brackenbury, the Constable of the Tower, ordering the deaths of the princes. Horrified, Brackenbury refused, whereupon Tyrell travelled to London with a letter authorising him to take complete command of the Tower for one night.

  On arriving at the Tower with his groom, John Dighton, he presented his credentials to Brackenbury who handed over the keys. Tyrell then set about the arrangements for the assassination — the victims were to be smothered in their beds by the groom Dighton, a known murderer by the name of Miles Forest and the jailer Black Will Slaughter Then, according to Sir Thomas More: “. . . this Miles Forest and John Dighton about midnight (the seelie children lieing in their beds) came into the chamber and suddenlie lapping them up amongst the clothes, so bewrapped them and entangled them, keeping downe by force the feather-bed and pillowes hard unto their mouths, that within a while, smothered and stifled, their breathe failing, they gave up to God their innocente soules.”

  As soon as Edward and his brother were dead, Tyrell was called to view their naked corpses after which he ordered them to be buried under a great pile of stones at the foot of the stairs in the White Tower. He then returned to the king to report his terrible task was accomplished. More wrote that Richard “gave him great thanks and some say made him a knight”, but he did have one objection, declaring that as the princes were of royal blood they should have been buried on consecrated ground. This was rectified by having them secretly disinterred and reburied by a priest.

  When King Henry gave this account the main characters in the plot were dead (including the priest who reburied the bodies), except for John Dighton. This man, said to be guilty of regicide, was not punished but, if we are to believe Francis Bacon, was given a pension provided he resided in Calais. While it was known that Henry had little love for the Plantagenets, it is curious that he allowed the murder of his own wife’s brothers to go un-avenged.

  Other questions arise. For example, Brackenbury was appalled at the thought of the murders, and if he handed over the Tower to Tyrell he must have known of the monstrous crime committed at Richard Ill’s command, yet he still died fighting for his cause on Bosworth Field. The reaction of Elizabeth Woodville adds to the mystery. Polydore Vergil, an author commissioned by Henry VII to write a history in 1506, described her hearing of her sons’ death in these words: “. . . forthwith she fell into a swoon and lay lifeless a good while; after coming to herself she weepeth, she cryeth out loud, and with lamentable shrieks maketh the house ring; she struck her breast, tore and cut her hair, and overcome in fine with dolour prayed also her own death.”

  Yet six months after this harrowing scene was supposed to have taken place, the dowager queen ended her feud with Richard and remained on friendly terms with him until Bosworth, her daughters often being guests at his palace for court festivities.

  Then there is the question of motive: why should Richard wish to murder Edward V when he had already achieved his ambition of taking over the throne? What was there to be gained by secret murder which, should the truth become known, would only bring great discredit to him? If he wished to set the seal on his position by murder he could not have stopped at Edward, there were his five sisters whose claim to the throne as daughters of the late king were as valid as Edward’s, while the Duke of Clarence’s son was only barred from the throne by an attainder which Richard, who himself had been under the ban of an attainder earlier on, knew only too well could be revoked.

  Richard III has been described as a “deep dissimular”, yet if he chose to kill his nephews in the manner described by Henry VII he showed very little cunning. If he believed Edward remained a threat to his position, the whole point of killing him would be for it to be known he was dead and therefore no longer a potential focal point for revolt. With so much power at his disposal, Richard could easily have arranged for the deaths of the princes to appear as the result of natural causes (perhaps by incarcerating them with plague victims) so their bodies could be traditionally displayed at St Paul’s.

  Since Tudor times the enigmatic Richard has been regarded as our greatest royal villain. Tudor writers, including Shakespeare, vied with each other in portraying the last Plantagenet monarch as a despicable monster. Yet the only evidence against Richard was given by Henry Tudor nearly two decades after he had usurped Richard’s throne.

  To some the pendulum has made a full swing and Richard is seen as a wronged Sir Galahad. We do know that he was a man of his times and when necessary could be ruthless, yet it does seem that there is considerable doubt as to his guilt over the murder of his nephews.

  In 1674, when excavations were being carried out at the Tower, workmen found two skeletons ten feet beneath the foundations of a staircase in the White Tower, a point which does throw doubt on the part of Tyrell’s confession about a priest managing to re-inter them secretly. The bones were left on a pile of rubbish until Charles II heard of them and, despite their being the third set of bones found in the precincts of the Tower which were thought to have been those of the princes, he commissioned Sir Christopher Wren to design a tomb for them in Westminster Abbey.

  The marble sarcophagus was opened in 1933 by a Professor Wright who examined the bones. All he could conclude was that they were the skeletons of two children aged twelve-and-a-half and ten- years, and no further light was shed on what really happened to Edward V.

  Shakespeare’s history was so faulty that he described Richard as fully adult and revelling in the slaughter of the Battle of Towton when in fact he was only eight years old. He also portrayed him as a hump-backed cripple, for which there is no evidence. Indeed, Richard must have been of good physique to have been able to make his gallant last charge at the Battle of Bosworth wearing his white German armour.

  Contents

  CHAPTER NINE - The Murder of Count Philip Koningsmark

  “Adorable one, I will love thee to the tomb!”

  SOPHIA DOROTHEA OF ZELL would have been crowned Queen of England when her husband became George I had it not been for a secret murder. “The story of the romantic life of the uncrowned queen has been shrouded in mystery,” wrote the historian W.H. Wilkins. “She has been even more misrepresented than Mary Queen of Scots, her imprisonment in the lonely castle of Ahlden was longer and more rigorous than Mary’s captivity in England, and the assassination of Koningsmark was as dramatic as the murder of Rizzio.”

  The proof of this royal murder only came to light after the actors in the tragedy had quit the stage. At first that stage resembled a setting for a Ruritanian masquerade in which extravagant ladies flirted with handsome men whose only concession to the background of war was their resplendent uniforms.

  The master of the masque was Ernest Augustus, Elector of Hanover, who was famous throughout Europe for his devotion to excessive drinking, hunting and sex, and whose more esoteric interests included astrology and alchemy. No doubt his ambition to find the Philosopher’s Stone was fired by the heavy financial demands of his sumptuous court and his stables which held six hundred horses. A glimpse of the elector’s style is given by W.M. Thackeray in this description of a royal carriage ride, “... the stout coachman driving the ponderous gilt wagon, with eight cream-coloured horses in housings of scarlet velvet and morocco leather; a postilion on the leaders and a pair or half a dozen of running footmen scudding along by the side of the vehicle, with conical caps, long silver-headed maces which they poised aloft as they ran, and splendid jackets laced all over with silver and gold. I fancy the citizens’ wives and their daughters looking out from the balconies; and the burghers over their beer, raising up, cup in hand , as the cavalcade passes through town with torch-bearers, trumpe
ters blowing their lusty cheeks out, and squadrons of jack-booted lifeguardsmen, girt with shining cuirasses, and bestriding thundering chargers, escorting his Highness’s coach from Hanover to Herrenhausen; or halting, mayhap, at Madame Platen’s country house of Monplaisir, which lies halfway between the summer-palace and the Residenz ...”

  One of the elector’s most profitable ways of raising money was by the hiring out of his well-drilled troops. He once supplied 6,700 of them to the Seignority of Venice, of which only fourteen hundred eventually returned to Hanover.

  “The ducats Duke Ernest got for his soldiers he spent in a series of the most brilliant entertainments,” wrote Thackeray. “Nevertheless, the jovial Prince was economical, and kept a steady eye on his own interests. He achieved the electoral dignity for himself: he married his eldest son George to his beautiful cousin of Zell, and sending his sons out in command of armies — now on this side, now on that — he lived on, taking his pleasures and scheming his schemes, a merry, wise prince enough, not, I fear, a moral prince ...”

  Towards the end of the Sixteenth Century it was not uncommon for adventurers of both sexes to drift from court to court until their charm, sex appeal or martial prowess gained them a position of influence. Two such adventurers — one a female, one male — were to shape the destiny of Hanover under Ernest Augustus. The first was Clara Elizabeth von Meysenbuch, then aged twenty-three, who, with her sister Maria Catherine, was determined to win a place close to a crown.

  The sisters first attempt to captivate a royal lover had been aided by their father, Count Charles Philip von Meysenbuch, who escorted them to Paris in the hope that one of them might succeed in becoming a mistress of the French king. It was an ambitious plot but the trio had not reckoned on the tenacity with which the established concubines were determined to keep their position. So frightening were their threats that the sisters quit France and, inspired by stories of the licentiousness of Ernest Augustus, arrived hopefully in his city.

  In Hanover the girls discovered the conquest of the elector was not to be accomplished overnight, and in order to entrench themselves in his circle they married two courtiers. Maria Catherine allowed Major General John von dem Bussche to lead her to the alter while Clara Elizabeth was wed by Baron Ernest von Platen and from then on was known — and feared - as “La Platen”.

  This necessary matrimony did not dampen her ambition, and she began a series of intrigues which promoted her husband to the position of prime minister while she finally succeeded in becoming the elector’s chief mistress. As such she was to reign supreme for the remainder of his lifetime, being shrewd enough not to object to him quenching his sexual appetites in other directions, sometimes with ladies of the court and sometimes with the maids who served them. His wife Sophia had been long accustomed to his blatant infidelities and focussed her energies upon her children.

  In 1682 the elector saw it was in his financial interest for his eldest son George Lewis (later George I of England) to marry Sophia Dorothea, the daughter of the Duke of Zell. It was said that the bridegroom was “purchased in hard cash” by the duke who saw many political advantages in the match. An agreement was reached for him to give Ernest Augustus the equivalent of £30,000 in contemporary English money plus a £10,000 annual payment for the next ten years. George Lewis was reluctant to follow his father’s plan, and only agreed to it on condition that he could keep Sophia Dorothea’s handsome dowry, which was separate from the duke’s payments, for himself.

  “He did not like it, but the money tempted him as it would anyone else,” his mother wrote.

  The court of Zell, in which Sophia Dorothea spent the first sixteen years of her life, had a strong French influence which made it one of the most polished in Europe, and though the Hanoverian court was lavish the princess was to yearn for the wit and gaiety which characterised her home. Historical writers agree that she was as intelligent as she was attractive, and she had been engaged to a prince of Wolfenbuttel before family ambition cast her as the link between Zell and Hanover.

  The wedding took place quietly in her apartment on November 21, and a few days later George Lewis took her on the state journey of thirty miles to Hanover with a cavalry regiment as an escort. A column of coaches full of courtiers, ministers and members of the elector’s family rolled out to greet them and doubtless Dorothea was especially interested in the magnificent equipage in which her new father-in-law’s mistress always travelled alone and in great splendour.

  The only person to be completely satisfied with the marriage was the elector who, with the injection of money from Zell in his exchequer, ordered his architects to work on a new hunting lodge, magnificent new stables and a system of reservoirs for his country palace of Herrenhausen to provide it with fountains similar to those at Versailles.

  The elector was more enthusiastic over his fountains than his son was over his bride who was equally indifferent to her dull and unpleasant husband. Already George Lewis had proved that he had inherited his father’s sensual appetites, and Lord Chesterfield wrote of him after he had become King of England: “The King loved pleasure, and was not delicate in his choice of it. No woman came amiss to him, if they were very willing and very fat... the standard of His Majesty’s taste made all those ladies who aspired to his favour, and who were near the staturable size, strain and swell themselves like the frogs in the fable to rival the bulk and dignity of the ox. Some succeeded, others burst.”

  George Lewis of Brunswick-Luneburg was born in Hanover on March 28, 1660, the first son of Ernest Augustus and his wife Sophia. She was the youngest daughter of Frederick of Wittelbach and Elizabeth Stuart, a daughter of King James I of England. It was through this thin blood line that George Lewis was to become the founder of the Hanoverian dynasty in England. He received the usual thorough education of a German prince, but his great interest was in stag hunting which was only equalled by his enthusiasm for the army when, at the age of fifteen, he went on his first campaign “bearing himself bravely at the battle of Conz on the Imperial side”.

  From the beginning of his marriage George Lewis did not disguise the fact that he preferred the military camp to the company of his high-spirited wife. He was at the siege of Vienna when she bore him his only son, the future George II of England; after which he went away on various campaigns, being at Buda when it was captured from the Turks and then soldiering in Greece, Germany and Flanders.

  Though the birth of the royal heir seemed to have no emotional effect on George Lewis, it did cause the old elector to take an affectionate interest in Sophia Dorothea. While on a prolonged holiday in Italy in the winter of 1685 he sent word back to Hanover inviting her to join his party along with the von Platen and von Bussche families. Soon afterwards George Lewis arrived in Hanover from commanding the Emperor’s troops in the east. It was a year since he had seen his wife, and he journeyed to Venice to join his father’s entourage. On his arrival he found that the royal party had progressed to Rome, and rather than bother to follow it he remained in Venice to pursue his predictable pleasures before returning to the war.

  When he returned to Hanover the following year he openly took a mistress. This was the result of intrigue by La Platen who, it was said, had encouraged the match between the Hanoverian heir and Sophia Dorothea in return for a bribe by William of Orange who feared the possibility of the elector’s son marrying Princess Anne of England. Having helped to bring Sophia Dorothea to Hanover, La Platen soon found that the princess made no secret of her disdain for the official mistress. When the elector showed a growing affection for his beautiful daughter-in-law La Platen began to feel her position threatened. She therefore planned to isolate the princess as much as possible, and her first move in this direction was to find “a woman to control George Lewis” who was now spending more time at court.

  She remembered that her now widowed sister Maria Catherine had entered into a brief affair with the prince before his marriage, and she endeavoured to reawaken his interest in her. If this had s
ucceeded it would have given the sisters immense power as the favourites of the elector and his heir, but when George Lewis showed he had no desire to revive the old passion La Platen put forward another candidate for the royal favour.

  Wilkes wrote: “The lady whom she chose as a decoy was Ermengrada Melusina von der Schulenberg, the daughter of an illustrious and noble house. In England she was to become the Duchess of Kendal, remaining a royal mistress until the death of George I. The young lady had only recently arrived in Hanover and was staying at Monplaisir. The countess introduced her to George Lewis on his return from Hungary with the result that he openly showed his preference for the company of the new arrival to that of his wife, and it was this public humiliation which removed the last vestiges of any loyalty Sophia Dorothea might have felt towards her boorish husband.”

  Mademoiselle Schulenberg was certainly no beauty and as dull as her lover, which is perhaps what he found attractive about her.

  “Look at them walking,” the Electress once said in disgust to an English lady visiting the court, “and think of her being my son’s passion!”

  There was no pretence of secrecy over the prince’s relationship with La Platen’s protegee, indeed it was regarded as something of an honour to be a regular bedfellow of one of the royal males of Hanover and special apartments were allocated for mademoiselle. Proud Sophia Dorothea could not accept the situation with the same equanimity as her mother-in-law accepted the promiscuity of the elector, and the birth of her daughter did nothing to reconcile her. Instead she ridiculed her husband’s mistress to his face and made a fatal enemy of Countess von Platen whom she regarded as the author of her humiliation.