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Originally Posted by gmw
For me, it doesn't really matter how they died, I want to know how and why it was kept a secret. Even Titulus Regius, which Henry VII tried so hard to destroy, eventually came to light, and even if the document itself hadn't, the attempt to make it a secret was no secret. These kids had a mother and siblings that should have wanted to talk about them later - one of them even became queen! So how was it possible hide the deaths of these children so effectively that we don't even know when they died?
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Wearever
That's the problem, it was kept secret. We don't know how or when they died. We don't know if they died in the tower. We only know they disappeared. We can make our best guess and follow a trail. It looks like Richard lll or even Henry Vll. We don't know for certain. Someone knew and they didn't talk or were killed themselves. I think follow the trail of who was killed instead of the Princes. There were many on both sides. Buckingham and Hastings were both killed by Richard for treason. They supported his claim to the throne but they also hated the Woodvilles.
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Despite Tey/Grant's belief in motherly love, and despite conflicting ideas about what actually happened to the princes, it seems pretty clear that they were pawns whose lives had little meaning to anyone except insofar as the power they represented. Their family seemed to act out of coldblooded practicality and expediency, with the singular goal of gaining power. And it seems that the family was hardly unique in those times.
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Originally Posted by Bookpossum
Yes, I investigated those books at the time I was reading, given that the book gives no indication of containing excerpts from another author's work. They were by Tey herself, I am quite sure, and appear nowhere except within Tey's book.
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Glad this came up; I too looked for these books. I find it a terrible betrayal of the reader to mix real sources with fake ones; even though Tey was writing fiction, she pretended that her characters were looking at actual, legitimate source material. Reinterpretation of the material to support her bias is one thing; total invention is quite another.