Not the most charismatic Tudor monarch, he is described in The Little Book of Monarchs as ‘ dour, manipulative and suspicious, beset by rebellions and pretenders’. The book is at its best when it brings the character of Henry Vll out of the shadows. If she does know what is going on, she keeps it to herself.Īccording to the book this is because Henry tells her that if she recognises him as her brother, then she and anybody else who does so will be executed for treason. We never know whether ‘Perkin’ really is Richard because his sister Elizabeth never says so. When the boy finally falls into Henry’s hands he is put under house arrest and initially treated well.īut the King of Spain, who is negotiating to marry his daughter Catherine of Aragon to Henry’s son Arthur, demands all pretenders must be eliminated before he gives his consent. He is provided with some troops and makes several invasion attempts while Henry Vll loudly claims that his real name is Perkin Warbeck, the son of a drunken Belgian barber from Tournai. The Kings of France and Scotland and the Holy Roman Emperor believe he is Richard and so do the Irish lords. We presume that the young king and the changeling were done away with and that it is the boy in the boat, now a young man in his 20s, who in Philippa’s novel emerges on the continent as pretender to the English throne. The real Duke of York was last seen being rowed to safety down the Thames. Whether this would have worked must be open to doubt of course.
When Gloucester demanded she hand over her younger son, Richard, Duke of York, to join his brother in The Tower, viewers of The White Queen will recall that Elizabeth sent a changeling in his place. When Richard Duke of Gloucester seized young Edward V on the road to London, his mother Elizabeth Woodville took herself and her other children into sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. Nevertheless, Philippa Gregory suggests a very interesting theory for the fate of the Princes in the Tower. But this reviewer felt she spent too much time dwelling on Elizabeth’s tortured mind and endless fears, making the book too long and the reader impatient for the next development. Writing in the first person, Philippa gets well inside the skin of the Yorkist princess who was betrothed to Lancastrian Henry Vll in an effort to unite their warring houses. Philippa’s extensive research appears to give her a peerless grasp of what life was like for a Tudor queen. If you enjoyed The White Queen TV series, based on Philippa Gregory’s book, your next step should be to read her follow-up novel The White Princess – the story of Elizabeth Woodville’s daughter, Elizabeth of York. Tony Boullemier reviews Philippa Gregory’s novel The White Princess and compares her theory on the Princes in the Tower to that of David Baldwin in his work of research, The Lost Prince.
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