Ep 143 - Princes in the Tower News!
Added 2023-11-30 16:53:04 +0000 UTCbeloved patrons, this is your ad-free version of this week's regular episode. we answer a question from Steph in this one.
as you may have heard, the Princes in the Tower are in the news again, 540 years after their supposed deaths. recently, Philippa Langley, who famously help find Richard III's body in a parking lot back in 2012, hosted a television special in the UK which alleged a new theory about the Princes in the Tower: they survived and later returned to the island in attempts to take back the throne. as you may recall from our series on the Wars of the Roses, the historical consensus is that the young Princes were murdered on the orders of the usurper king Richard III, an event which led to his overthrow and defeat at the hands of Henry Tudor. we discuss the evidence that Langley puts forth, what it means if true, and, most importantly, how this affects George RR Martin's writing schedule for The Winds of Winter.
Comments
Thanks for the reasonable take on Langley! A lot of history accounts online, especially English ones, are really quick to shit on her in what feels like a really uncharitable way, and a lot of it just feels very elitist and mean-spirited. She's an amateur, not a professional, and she clearly wants to exonerate Richard III, so yeah of course she's got an agenda (and even professionals do have their favorites!), but this way of doing almost open source, crowd sourced research and digging up all these new documents is also objectively a pretty cool thing for an amateur historian to do. There's no harm really in just saying well done, you found some interesting stuff, without all of the snide dismissive commentary about what a crank Philippa Langley is and basically how she should leave the research to the grown ups with PhDs (who know for certain that R3 killed the princes). Like, of all of the hobbies a person could have, combing archives and finding the graves of long dead kings and unearthing old documents is pretty harmless?? And kind of cool? She's looking for and producing evidence, not making stuff up or producing forgeries, even if her conclusions based on the evidence are kind of iffy. But it would be neat if Perkin Warbeck turned out to be real, and it's a fun story, even if we'll probably never know for sure, and knowing wouldn't really change anything either way.
Jessica Wang
2023-12-01 17:34:34 +0000 UTCThank you for the thoughtful response. afaik (this is Luke btw), those are the exact same program. I took my info about where it appeared first from a news article, so I didn’t know about other airings
lukeisamazing
2023-11-30 20:03:58 +0000 UTCOkay, a couple thoughts. First, I am assuming that the one-hour Secrets of the Dead episode (S21E03, on PBS) gives all the relevant information/theory that was in the two-hour program that was aired on TV 4 in the UK? They both featured barrister Rob Rinder and I assume they are basically the same program with more or less editing. Thanks for your take on the evidence which I find no fault in. As for the program, in its US version anyway: Langley seems to think it is a very big deal that she was able to impress Rinder, a *barrister*, on the theory that barristers are very reliable in weighing evidence and determining truth. To this end she flies Rinder all around Europe which is very showy but strikes me sort of as the Old Razzle Dazzle. I would have been more impressed if she had had a medieval historian examine the evidence in a single room and pose questions about dating and provenance and the other records from the time. I am also a bit skeptical about this idea that this or that document was buried in the stacks of such and such an archive but was never unearthed until Langley issued the clarion call for Tower Princes Evidence to be searched for
Ted Delphos
2023-11-30 20:01:25 +0000 UTC
