O wondrous thing! How easily murder is discovered!
Titus Andronicus, Act 2, Scene 2
Everyone loves a good murder. Our desire to watch, read and hear about murders in all their grisly detail seems insatiable. Crime dramas on TV are perennial favourites and news outlets eagerly report details of the latest homicide, but this is nothing new. Shakespeare knew what would attract a crowd when he created some of the best-known villains of the stage and dramatised what became often repeated, even parodied, moments of murder.
Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories are littered with the bodies of characters who got in the way of someone’s ambition or were cut down because of some perceived insult. Othello deliberately suffocates Desdemona, thinking she has been unfaithful to him. Macbeth clears his path to the crown by slicing through anyone who might try to take it from him. He is also careful to plant evidence on others to cover his tracks. Shakespeare portrays the Plantagenet kings bumping each other off at an alarming rate to secure their positions on the throne (as they often did in real life) though they usually got others to do the dirty work for them.
If Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights couldn’t sate the bloodthirsty appetites of their audiences, there were plenty of other outlets supplying stories of murders and murderers. From the early years of Elizabeth’s reign the public were treated to a constant stream of pamphlets and ballads describing the lives and eventual fates of notorious criminals. These were far from being well-researched, fact-based reportage. ‘The prose and verse are largely stereotyped, while the illustrations are scarcely credible’ is how one student of popular literature described them.
Murder is a fairly broad category and could reasonably include deaths that occur as a result of a violent argument or war. Some have used the chaos of the battlefield to exact revenge on a rival, as in the case of John Stafford who in 1460 at the battle of Northampton sought out Sir William Lucy, husband of the woman he was having an affair with, and killed him.1 Executions could also be seen as the deliberate planning of a death, but at least there is usually a judicial process beforehand that gives the act a different legal status. To narrow things down a little bit this chapter will look at Shakespeare’s accounts of deaths brought about as a deliberate, planned act by another person – murder with malice aforethought – and how not to get away with it. Poisonings will get their own chapter.
* * *
Some of Shakespeare’s murders are notable because attempts are made at forensic examination to determine the cause. Other deaths are interesting because Shakespeare was happy to lay the blame on a specific person, even if historically there was some doubt in the matter. In doing so, Shakespeare has possibly tarnished the reputations of several historical figures. The murder of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester by the Earl of Suffolk in Henry VI Part II is an example of both historically inaccurate finger-pointing and surprisingly detailed forensic examination.
In the play Duke Humphrey is found dead in his bed. The body is closely examined to determine if the cause was natural or if there has been foul play. It is part forensic examination and part whodunit, all played out in a few short moments. It is almost the prototype police or detective drama, with investigation, suspicion and accusation, but this is not a Shakespearean murder mystery. The idea of a detective drama, where the reader or audience is also ignorant of the culprit and can play along to see if they guess before the characters, was invented in the nineteenth century. Shakespeare never created any mystery over who was responsible for the death; it was well advertised to the audience even if the characters in the play are ignorant. But the investigation of Duke Humphrey’s body is not a million miles from modern detective dramas that show forensic experts and detectives crowding round a dead body, looking for evidence of the cause of death and who might be responsible.
Forensic science, in terms of fingerprinting, toxicology and so on, was developed in the late nineteenth century, but that does not mean that no attempt was made to determine cause of death or seek evidence of foul play before then. The role of coroner was established in England in 1194 and while the job had many responsibilities, one of the main ones was determining the cause in cases of suspicious death. Forensic dissections have been carried out in England since the thirteenth century. Shakespeare would have been well aware of this kind of examination, as his father was required to be present during post-mortems as part of his job when he was an alderman in Stratford.
In the play, the audience knows that Duke Humphrey has been murdered. When the body is discovered Warwick immediately suspects foul play: ‘I do believe that violent hands were laid / Upon the life of this thrice-famed duke.’ Suffolk pretends to be incredulous, knowing full well the Duke was murdered on his very specific and detailed orders. He had clearly hoped to get away with it by arranging things in such a way as to make it look like natural causes. But the murderers were either not up to the job, or Warwick’s sharp eyes are too good for Suffolk’s planning.2
The first thing Warwick notices is the colour of Duke Humphrey’s face. Pallor can reveal a lot about a corpse. The colour can be very different from that of a living person, but it varies enormously between corpses and even between different parts of the same corpse. For example, fluorescent yellow means liver failure. Pink strongly suggests carbon monoxide poisoning. Very, very pale is due to haemorrhage. Blue results from cyanosis. Dark and pale patches can be scrutinised to see if a corpse has been moved.
Warwick compares the colour of Duke Humphrey’s face with the paleness he expects to see in a dead body: ‘Oft have I seen a timely parted ghost, / Of ashy semblance, meagre, pale and bloodless, / Being all descended to the labouring heart […] Which with the heart there cools, and ne’er returneth / To blush and beautify the cheek again.’ Exactly as Warwick points out, when the heart stops pumping blood around the body, gravity causes it to pool at the lowest points. A dead body lying in a bed would be expected to have a pale face and purplish colouration (known as lividity) on the back, buttocks and back of the legs where the blood collects. Pale patches occur where pressure is exerted against the skin and the blood is squeezed out of the tissue. As the blood moves down, higher parts of the body can look flat or depressed as blood and plasma slowly sinks.
Warwick goes further: ‘see, his face is black and full of blood: / His eyeballs further out than when he lived, / Staring full ghastly like a strangled man’. He is convinced the Duke has been killed by strangulation and lists the signs he considers to be evidence of this. The bulging eyes and ‘blood is settled in his face’ suggests something has stopped it from sinking. Pressure on the neck can squeeze veins shut, preventing blood from draining from the head.
Manual strangulation is one of three types of asphyxia,3 but death is not actually caused by the compression of the windpipe preventing oxygen entering the lungs, as may be thought. The pressure needed to compress and totally block the trachea is said to be around 33 psi (pounds per square inch), or like trying to squash flat a well-inflated car tyre using just your hands. Instead, death is due to compressed veins damming up blood inside the head, or stimulation of the vagus nerves in the neck causing cardiac arrest, or a combination of these factors (see Chapter 4).
There are several clues to corroborate Warwick’s theory. ‘But see, his face is black and full of blood’ may also refer to another phenomenon often observed in manual strangulation – petechiae. These are small red or purple spots (0.1–2mm in size) caused by the rupture of the thin walls of tiny blood vessels near the surface of the skin. Their appearance is especially common in lax or unsupported tissues, such as the eyelid, forehead or behind the ears. Sometimes the bleeding can be extreme, and not held under the skin, so blood escapes from the nose or ears. However, petechiae are not just caused by strangulation; violent sneezing can result in their almost instant appearance, and so their presence cannot be taken as confirmation of strangulation, but, along with other evidence, has to be explained.
If the Duke was strangled, as the above evidence suggests, it is strange no one seems to have checked the Duke’s neck. There could be marks left by a ligature, or bruising from hands, or scratches from the victim trying to fight off his attacker, but then these are not always apparent. Natural post-mortem changes can also affect colouration and the longer the body is left lying before it is discovered, the more opportunity for post-mortem changes to occur. In a modern court of law, without evidence of bruising on the face or neck, the colour of the face alone would not be accepted as conclusive proof of foul play. Perhaps the discolouration observed in the face is due to bruising from an assault, and there is other evidence of a struggle that would back this up.
The lines ‘his nostrils stretched with struggling: / His hands abroad displayed, as one that grasped / And hugged for life and was by strength subdued’ could be a description of rapid onset of rigor mortis. During life the body produces adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a form of fuel used by the cells to carry out various tasks within the body. One role of ATP is to allow the smooth gliding of muscle fibres over one another. After death no more ATP can be produced; the fibres become bound to one another and the muscle stiffens. Muscles exhausted of their energy stores after a lot of exertion become bound up and hardened into a fixed position after death. But the exertion that caused rigor mortis in Duke Humphrey’s face and hands may have been due to convulsions brought on by natural causes.
Look on the sheets his hair, you see, is sticking.
His well-proportioned beard, made rough and rugged,
Like to the summer’s corn by tempest lodged:
It cannot be but he was murdered here:
The least of all these signs were probable.
The disordered beard and hair sticking to the sheets are perhaps signs that the Duke was smothered, which is the second form of asphyxia.4 When the mouth and nose are obstructed, the body is both deprived of oxygen, and also cannot expel the carbon dioxide (CO2) produced in the body by respiration. As CO2 levels in the blood increase, the pulse quickens and blood pressure rises. The increase in CO2 lowers the pH of the blood and creates a state called hypercarbia, which produces extreme anxiety. There will be increasingly strenuous attempts to draw breath and the victim is likely to pass out after about 15 seconds, but they are not dead.
There are reserves of oxygen within the body and some parts of the body have lower oxygen demands than others. The brain has a very high oxygen demand and very little in the way of reserves. Without oxygen, cells cannot get energy and quickly die. Cells in the central part of the brain hold out the longest, but in the space of a few minutes cell death will have reached even these protected areas that regulate breathing and heartbeat. As a result convulsions may be triggered and the efforts to breathe become increasingly weak and shallow; the heartbeat becomes irregular and finally stops.
Covering the mouth and nose may prevent oxygen from entering the lungs and circulating but dark, deoxygenated blood is still free to move around the head and body. This can cause a blue discolouration known as cyanosis. But if the Duke was smothered, any discolouration would be expected throughout the body, not just the face.
None of the signs Warwick lists are in themselves conclusive proof of foul play, but collectively they are certainly suggestive. The discussion around the state of the body and the circumstances of the death perhaps echoes some of the concerns expressed when the real-life Duke Humphrey was found dead in his bed in 1447.
The real-life Duke of Suffolk had accused Humphrey of plotting against the King. Humphrey denied everything but on 11 February he was placed under house arrest and 12 days later he died. According to Holinshed’s Chronicles, his body was shown to the Lords and Commons and showed signs that he had died of palsy, or of an impostume (an abscess).
Duke Humphrey’s death was certainly convenient, and some thought it was a little too convenient. Rumours started very early that the Duke had been killed by strangulation, suffocation between two beds, or even by ‘a thrust into the bowel with an hot burning spit’. The speculation was that Suffolk was responsible, but there is no evidence that the Duke was murdered. Duke Humphrey’s friend, Abbot Whethampstead, believed he had died of natural causes. He was 56 at the time of his death and his life had been filled with drink and debauchery. The Duke had lain in bed in a coma for three days before expiring and so it was probably a stroke that killed him.
The gossip surrounding Humphrey’s death contributed to the belief that Gloucester was an unlucky title – three of those who were given it died miserable deaths. Thomas of Woodstoke, was the first unfortunate Gloucester. He was murdered in 1397 by being smothered with towels (although when the murder is reported in Richard II it is implied he was stabbed). The aforementioned Duke Humphrey was the second Gloucester to come to a horrible end. Shakespeare picked up on this story and when young Richard Plantagenet, son of the Duke of York, is given the title Gloucester in Henry VI Part III, he begs to have a different dukedom, as Gloucester brings bad luck. And, for the man who later became King Richard III, it certainly did.5
* * *
Something about Duke Humphrey’s death in his bed by suffocation or strangulation may have sparked a particular dramatic interest in Shakespeare. He used more or less the same set-up for one of his most famous murders: that of Desdemona at the hands of her jealous husband, the title character in Othello.
Shakespeare’s tale of betrayal and deception has the wicked Iago convince his master, Othello, that his beloved wife has been unfaithful. In a desperate rage he kills her by strangling her. He thinks she is dead but she revives long enough to tell her maid who attacked her, before collapsing again and dying.
The tale is borrowed from A Moorish Captain, an Italian short story by Giovanni Battista Giraldi that would almost certainly have been lost and forgotten if it wasn’t for the Shakespeare connection. The Bard was expert at taking other people’s stories and reworking them into something brilliant. In the original tale Desdemona is beaten to death by the Iago character while the Moor watches. Then the two lay the lifeless body on her bed and pull down the roof on top of her to make it look like an accident. The original story also has both men arrested and tortured, but the Moor refuses to confess and so is banished. He is eventually killed by Desdemona’s relatives. The torture of the Iago character results in his body rupturing and he is ‘taken home, where he died a miserable death’.
Shakespeare made some significant changes when he adapted Giraldi’s tale for the stage. Changing how Desdemona is killed avoids the practical difficulties of collapsing a roof on top of someone onstage. But other changes radically alter the relationship between both Othello and his wife and Othello and Iago. Othello and Iago no longer work together and instead Othello becomes directly responsible for his wife’s death. Iago’s manipulation of everyone onstage has left audiences speculating over his motives for over four centuries.
In the play the stage directions say ‘[He stifles her]’, which could mean Othello uses the bedclothes or his hands to suffocate her. Either method would come under the generally accepted definition of asphyxia but could potentially result in very different physical signs on Desdemona’s body.
Regardless of the method he uses, Othello thinks Desdemona is dead and stops the process of suffocation: ‘Ha! no more moving? / Still as the grave’. He is interrupted by the arrival of Emilia, Desdemona’s maid, who fails to notice anything amiss. She is clearly distracted by news of another murder and may not notice her mistress lying on the bed. Even if she did there may have been nothing to rouse her suspicions.
In fact Desdemona is not dead and has merely fallen unconscious. Removing the bedclothes or his hands would allow the flow of oxygen into and through the body to be returned to normal. Most people can hold their breath for 30 seconds without suffering any permanent harm.6 But withholding oxygen from the brain beyond a few minutes usually means brain cells start to die. Had she been successfully strangled by Othello’s hands, it would be expected that her face would look more like that of Duke Humphrey, described above, with prominent eyes and discolouration of the skin. But strangulation does not always produce petechiae and there may have been no sign of bruising.
Initially, no damage seems to have been done to Desdemona’s brain: as soon after Othello stops trying to kill her, she regains consciousness and begins speaking coherently. At this point she should have made a full recovery, but then she collapses again and dies, so something else must have happened to her during the assault.
The suddenness of her collapse indicates a dramatic change in health. One possible explanation is that she hit her head during the struggle with Othello. The knock wouldn’t need to be particularly severe; it is where the blow occurred that is more important. Some parts of the skull are more vulnerable than others and the force of impact doesn’t always obviously correspond to the extent of damage. Severe blows can leave an individual without concussion but a slight knock can be followed by unconsciousness and even death.
A sudden acceleration or deceleration, such as a knock against a wall or bedpost, stops the skull, but the tissue inside continues to move until it meets the walls of the skull. Effectively the brain sloshes around within the limited space available. Sudden changes in force can cause a vein to rupture and bleed into the cranial cavity, and then pressure can build and cause further damage to brain tissue. When the pressure is too high it results in sudden collapse, and the pressure on the brain from the bleed can be fatal.
Othello is a notable exception among Shakespeare’s murderers in that he readily confesses to his crime. Most of the others try to justify their actions, shift the blame on to others or disguise the crime in some way. The conspirators who murder Julius Caesar do so because they see him as an unsuitable ruler. Macbeth leaves bloody daggers with Duncan’s sleeping guards so everyone will think they are guilty, and he also tries to stage the murder of Banquo as a robbery. As we have seen, Suffolk tries to make his murder of Duke Humphrey look like natural causes. In King Lear, the murderer attempts to cover his tracks by trying to disguise the murder as suicide.
* * *
As with many of his works, there are several sources Shakespeare probably drew upon to create King Lear. Holinshed’s Chronicles provides the main character names: King Leir, said to have been King of Britain in the eighth century, and his daughters Gonorilla, Regan and Cordelia. It is also from Holinshed that he got the basic premise of a king who wants to divide his kingdom between his three daughters, but cuts off the inheritance to the youngest, and suffers the consequences. There were already several theatrical adaptations of the tale before Shakespeare took it on, so the story of King Lear was well known to Elizabethan audiences. In all the previous versions of the tale Cordelia and the King are reconciled and live happily ever after.
In Shakespeare’s adaptation, Edmund gives the instruction ‘To hang Cordelia in the prison and / To lay the blame upon her own despair’. Lear interrupts the guard while he is attempting to hang Cordelia. He kills him and carries his daughter’s body onstage. Hoping he has reached her in time, he desperately checks for signs of life.
Cordelia’s face must be pale and there can be no obvious injuries, otherwise Lear would accept her death more readily. It therefore seems likely that the murderer choked, strangled or smothered Cordelia before hanging her. As we have seen from Desdemona’s revival in Othello, and in the chapter on execution, hangings and attempted suffocations were not always fatal. Lear has reason to hope that Cordelia may yet still live and everyone is kept guessing over several lines as Lear alternates between hope and despair. But there is no hope. Cordelia is dead and Lear dies from grief. Elizabethan audiences would have been expecting a last-minute recovery and the deaths would have come as a genuine shock. Edmund confesses, but if he hadn’t, and even if Lear had not interrupted the hanging process, he is still unlikely to have got away with it.
There are clear post-mortem differences between strangulation, suffocation and hanging. If Cordelia was garrotted, even if it was with the same rope that was then used to hang her, there would be evidence that she had died before being suspended. There would be no need for sophisticated forensic examination; the pattern of the rope marks should give a clear indication of foul play. Ropes and other ligatures usually leave marks on the neck, and these would be at different angles depending on how the rope was used. For strangulation, the line would be horizontal and would usually circle the whole neck. In a hanging the ligature mark would be angled up towards the point of suspension with a gap underneath the knot.
If Cordelia had been suffocated, and was dead before she was hanged, the rope would not make the same marks on the skin, as her blood would no longer be flowing. However, not all cells die at the same time so there is a period of time around the point of death, referred to as perimortem, where it can be difficult to judge if injuries were obtained before or after death.
Signs of scratches at the neck might also indicate that she was trying to fight off her attacker or remove the rope, but would not be conclusive signs of murder taken on their own. But careful examination and combined evidence would make a strong case for murder.
In King Lear Edmund is undoubtedly a scheming, villainous character, but even he doesn’t come close to Shakespeare’s most notorious murderer – Richard III. The ruthless, plotting, evil hunchback is perhaps the prototype pantomime villain.
* * *
Shakespeare was certainly happy to apportion blame where it suited his dramatic purposes and as a result several historical figures have had their reputations tarnished. Richard III has perhaps suffered more than most at the Bard’s hand, though he was certainly no saint. Even his hunched back, his limp and his withered arm is a gross exaggeration.7 Shakespeare, and many others, exaggerated King Richard’s physical characteristics to show his inherent evilness.
Shakespeare was writing at a time when it was politic to curry favour with the Tudor Queen Elizabeth and deride her Plantagenet predecessors. In many respects he was merely repeating the propaganda of his day, with a few embellishments for dramatic purposes. That is not to say that Richard wasn’t particularly ruthless, but there may not be quite so much blood on his hands as the play might lead you to believe.
Richard Plantagenet, Duke of Gloucester, appears in three of Shakespeare’s plays before he is made king, which is a considerable back story. Though he appears in all three parts of Henry VI, it isn’t until the final part that his ambitions become clear. He covets the crown for himself, but he points out that ‘many lives stand between me and home’. Not that this seems to deter him: ‘were it farther off, I’ll pluck it down’. He spends the rest of this play and the following one (Richard III) killing everyone in his way until he achieves his goal. It is certainly dramatic, just not always historically accurate.
According to Shakespeare, Richard III’s deadly tally is considerable. In the fourth act of Richard III Queen Margaret meets with the Duchess of York and Queen Elizabeth to compare notes and tick off a list of murders they attribute to Richard. Queen Margaret sets them off:
Tell o’er your woes again by viewing mine:
I had an Edward, till a Richard kill’d him;
I had a Harry, till a Richard kill’d him:
Thou hadst an Edward, till a Richard kill’d him;
Thou hadst a Richard, till a Richard killed him …
In total the Bard attributes 11 murders to Richard (12 if you count the mental torment he inflicted on his brother Edward IV as a contributing factor in his death). He was also responsible for many deaths during the various battles he took part in, but Shakespeare gives him a few extra for good measure. For example, in Henry VI Part II he is shown killing Somerset during the Battle of Saint Albans, though he was in fact three years old at the time. His murderous career begins in earnest in Henry VI Part III, where he fights alongside his brother King Edward IV in the Battle of Tewkesbury against Henry VI’s forces. Edward is victorious, but to secure his place on the throne Richard helps him eliminate any competition for the crown, and thereby moves himself closer to it as well. The most serious threat is Prince Edward of Westminster, King Henry VI’s only son and heir. Edward of Westminster was just 17 in 1471 when he went into battle on his father’s side. Richard was only a year older.
According to contemporary accounts, Edward of Westminster ‘died in the field’, the only heir to the English throne to die in battle. However, there are alternative theories as to what happened. Croyland, writing in 1486, states the Prince died ‘either on the field or after the battle, by the avenging hands of certain persons’. Those certain persons were said to be Thomas Grey, 1st Marquis of Dorset, and Lord Hastings. Shakespeare adopted the more dramatic version and then went on to embellish it further. Instead of Dorset and Hastings, he has the Prince stabbed by Edward IV and his two brothers Richard and George. Edward of Westminster is killed after the fighting has ended – this is murder.
With Henry’s heir dead there is now only the niggling worry that the deposed King Henry VI will become the inspiration for rebellion. Richard immediately sets off for London and the Tower where Henry is being held captive.
Henry VI may have been a vague and ineffectual king, easily swayed by those around him, but Shakespeare allows that he at least has the measure of Richard. When he appears in Henry’s rooms the normally mild-mannered King, who never has a bad word to say against anyone, greets him with, ‘Ay, my good lord:—my lord, I should say rather; / ’Tis sin to flatter; ‘good’ was little better: / ‘Good Gloucester’ and ‘good devil’ were alike’. Henry is also under no illusion as to why Richard is there, ‘But wherefore dost thou come? is’t for my life?’ After Richard confirms he has already killed Henry’s son the King prophesies that it is the first murder of many more to come. Tired of listening to Henry run through Richard’s many faults, ‘I’ll hear no more: die, prophet in thy speech’: Richard stops him talking by stabbing him.
Richard makes little effort to conceal his crime. He may not have told his brothers exactly what he was going to London to do, but it wasn’t difficult for them to guess. He may have sent Henry’s guard out of the room so he couldn’t witness the actual murder, but it wouldn’t have been difficult to put two and two together. At the end of the scene he drags the body of the murdered King out of the room, but this is because the stage needs to be clear for the next scene and not because he is trying to hide the crime. In real life the details of how Henry VI died were at least suppressed and a cover story concocted, even though it stretched credibility to its limits.
Henry VI died, if not immediately, then not long after the battle of Tewkesbury. The official account was that he died of ‘pure displeasure and melancholy’ on hearing that his son had been killed in battle. But it was a particularly violent kind of melancholy brought on by the rapid application of blade against flesh, a detail left out at the time. In 1911 the body of Henry VI was exhumed and examined; the bones of the skull were found to be ‘much broken’. One part of the skull still had hair attached, matted with what looked like blood.
Who was responsible for breaking Henry VI’s skull is less certain. Richard was at the Tower on the fatal night, and it is difficult to explain why else he would have been there. But as to whether he went alone into the King’s rooms and committed regicide, shouting, ‘Down to hell, and say I sent thee thither!’ as Shakespeare has it, is not clear. Whether he was personally involved or not, he certainly had motive, as it brought him much closer to getting his hands on the crown.
* * *
Richard III picks up from where Henry VI Part III leaves off. The second scene of the play has Richard pacing round the coffins of his two alleged murder victims, Prince Edward of Westminster and King Henry VI. Also in the room is Edward’s widow, Lady Anne, mourning over her dead husband. In case anyone in the audience had forgotten what happened in the last play, Anne uncovers Henry’s body: ‘see, see! dead Henry’s wounds / Open their congeal’d mouths and bleed afresh!’ – confirmation that Richard was guilty of his murder.
From the twelfth century right up until the nineteenth, it was common for accused murderers to be brought to the corpse of their alleged victim and made to touch the body. It was believed that wounds really did bleed again in the presence of the murderer. The test was known as ‘cruentation’ or ‘ordeal of the brier’. It would be an extraordinary set of coincidences if this ever really did happen. After death blood may seep from wounds for a short period of time, but after about six hours it has settled and solidified to an extent that prevents further flow. It is true that blood can re-liquefy at a later time owing to decomposition. Even then, the body would likely need a good shove to get the wounds bleeding again.
If the sight of a freshly bleeding corpse wasn’t sickening enough, then watching Richard woo the widow of one of his victims over the coffin is truly nauseating. It may seem unbelievable that Richard could talk Anne into marrying her husband’s murderer, but that is exactly what he does. The playwright didn’t invent this for dramatic purposes either. Richard might not have killed Edward of Westminster, but he did marry his widow a year later.8 In the play Richard confides to the audience, ‘I’ll have her; but I will not keep her long.’ Anne’s fate as another of Richard’s victims is sealed before she even has the ring on her finger.
Later in the play, in a transparent attempt to cover up the planned murder of his wife Lady Anne, Richard deliberately spreads rumours that she ‘is sick and like to die’. It is heavily implied that he poisons her. Holinshed’s Chronicles presents a slightly different account. Richard did complain that his wife was barren and started rumours that she was sick. But this was because she probably was sick, and on 16 March 1485 she died, possibly of cancer or tuberculosis. Richard’s reluctance to visit his wife on her sickbed, and his apparent indifference to her death, led many at the time to believe that she had been poisoned by him. Richard also didn’t wait until his wife was dead to make it known he would quite like to marry his niece, which only made things look even more suspicious.
Richard’s treatment of Lady Anne is certainly in keeping with his villainous character, but it does not advance him any closer to his goal.9 His brother George, Duke of Clarence, stands between him and the throne; being the older brother he would inherit before Richard. Shakespeare rewrote the real-life downfall of Clarence to add another murder to his growing list and to cast Richard as a supreme opportunist and manipulator.
The plan is set up in the very first scene of Richard III: ‘Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous, / By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams, / To set my brother Clarence and the king / In deadly hate the one against the other’. Richard then bumps into Clarence on his way to the Tower after he has been arrested. Not suspecting that Richard is behind the plot, Clarence speculates that the reason Edward wants him imprisoned is because ‘a wizard told him that by G / His issue disinherited should be; / And, for my name of George begins with G, / It follows in his thought that I am he.’
According to Holinshed’s Chronicles, Edward IV did receive a prophecy that the person who reigned after him would have a name beginning with the letter G. Edward interpreted this as his brother, George, Duke of Clarence. The prophecy was later proved to be right, as it was Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who succeeded to the throne. Edward simply picked the wrong G. Shakespeare took an existing story of a prophecy and attributed it to a plot by Richard, who he then has ‘urge his hatred more to Clarence, / With lies well steel’d with weighty arguments’.
In the play, Edward IV issues an order for the execution of Clarence as a traitor, but then has second thoughts and another order is given out to cancel the execution. Richard knows about both orders but acts on the first one. He instructs two murderers to kill Clarence, who plan to ‘Take him over the costard [the head] with the hilts of thy sword, and then we will chop him in the malmsey-butt in the next room.’10
Stabbing followed by drowning in a barrel of wine wasn’t just an example of some very black humour on Shakespeare’s part; it may have some truth to it. Clarence was executed for treason on 18 February 1478, though Richard was not behind the plot as Shakespeare would have his audience believe. And some contemporary reports state that Clarence really was drowned in a butt of malmsey, some say at his own request. Drowning in alcohol is less fun than it may seem. Death occurs because the body is deprived of oxygen, and would occur long before the effects of alcohol could numb the horrible experience.
In the play everyone believes Clarence has been pardoned, so when the death is announced it comes as a terrible shock, particularly to the King, who believed the execution order had been revoked. The news of the death badly affects the King’s already fragile health and he starts to doubt the Queen’s motives towards him. He blames himself and also blames his wife for urging him on. Richard has removed someone who stands between him and the crown, and now all he has to do is sit back and wait in the hope that the King will die while his son is too young to rule and he can take over. He has done everything he can to stack the odds in his favour. Richard only has to wait until the next scene for his plan to work.
In reality Edward IV died on 9 April 1483, five years after Clarence’s execution, probably of over-indulgence, and possibly from venereal disease. His 12-year-old son, Prince Edward, became King Edward V, but he never reigned. Richard had a short window of opportunity to wrench control from the Queen and her powerful family. He made the most of it. Within three months it would be Richard III, and not Edward V, who was sitting on the throne. His first move was to get custody of the young King and his younger brother Richard of Shrewsbury.
As depicted in the play, the two boys were travelling to London for the coronation when they were intercepted by Richard’s men. At Stony Stratford the princes’ escorts, Earl Rivers, Sir Richard Grey and Sir Thomas Vaughan, were arrested and sent to Pomfret Castle. When the widowed Queen Elizabeth hears the news she sets the scene for what is to come:
Ay me, I see the downfall of our house!
The tiger now hath seized the gentle hind;
Insulting tyranny begins to jet
Upon the innocent and aweless throne:
Welcome, destruction, death, and massacre!
I see, as in a map, the end of all.
Richard placed the two boys where he could control them: ‘Your highness shall repose you at the Tower: / Then where you please, and shall be thought most fit / For your best health and recreation.’ Although the audience knows full well he is up to no good his behaviour towards the children is not unreasonable at this stage. Being sent to the Tower did not mean imprisonment or certain death, far from it. The Tower, as well as rooms for condemned criminals, also had royal apartments, and a well-defended castle was the safest place for the two young boys. But it was also a very convenient place to keep them if your intention was to take the crown from them.
Richard now accelerates his murderous campaign. At a meeting held at the Tower, Richard suddenly turns on his erstwhile friend and supporter, Lord Hastings: ‘Thou art a traitor: / Off with his head! Now, by Saint Paul I swear, / I will not dine until I see the same.’ Hastings is immediately taken away to be executed and in the following scene, just in time for dinner, his decapitated head is brought onstage to be shown to Richard.
Shakespeare’s depiction of the meeting and Hastings’ rapid change in fortunes is remarkably accurate. On 13 June the two did attend a meeting at the Tower, which started off well enough but ended with Hastings being beheaded on the green outside. According to the history books the execution was carried out so quickly, ‘without any process of law or lawful examination’, that there was no executioner’s block available and Hastings had to rest his head on a log.
Rivers, Grey and Vaughan, the princes’ escorts arrested at Stony Stratford back in April, were executed at Pomfret on 25 June, without trial. According to Holinshed the prisoners weren’t even allowed to make the customary speeches on the scaffold. The following day Richard rode in state to Westminster Hall where, sitting on the marble throne, he took the royal oath. He was now King Richard III. There was only the small problem that the legitimate king and heir to the throne were still alive.
Shakespeare makes Richard’s intentions clear early on. As soon as he has persuaded Prince Edward to go to the Tower he remarks to the audience, ‘So wise so young, they say, do never live long.’ Eight scenes (and in reality two or three months) later the two Princes are dead. Richard, now King, doesn’t want to get his hands dirty and so he asks his page, ‘Know’st thou not any whom corrupting gold / Would tempt unto a close exploit of death?’ On the page’s recommendation, Sir James Tyrell is employed to kill the two boys, but Tyrell subcontracts the work out to ‘Dighton and Forrest, whom I did suborn / To do this ruthless piece of butchery’. Audiences are spared the sight of the actual murders but Tyrell reports the two boys are smothered in their beds.
The play follows the account of the murders described by Sir Thomas More. His emotional and elaborately detailed version of events was written several decades after they occurred. Contemporary accounts are rather vague about exactly what went on in the Tower. Dominic Mancini, an Italian friar visiting London in 1483, wrote that the two children ‘were withdrawn into the inner Apartments of the Tower proper and day by day began to be seen more and more rarely behind the bars and windows, till at length they ceased to appear altogether.’ Mancini suspected that the princes had been murdered but admitted that he did not know for certain. Other contemporary accounts tend to agree with Mancini’s suspicions. Once the princes disappeared, it was fully expected that they would be killed and Richard was the prime suspect.
The fifteenth century may have been a violent time with political assassinations and wars bringing a high death toll, but the deliberate murder of innocent children was as shocking then as it would be today. Richard’s popularity, already low, would have suffered considerably if he was proved to have been responsible for the deaths of a young king and heir and his brother, who were also his own nephews. If he was responsible he was also sensible enough to cover up the crime.
In More’s version of events, after a very detailed account of the murder, he goes on to say that the bodies were buried at the foot of a staircase, but they were subsequently re-interred in a site more fitting, on Richard’s orders. Unfortunately no one knows where this more fitting site might be. Shakespeare is even more vague than More about what happened to the bodies. He has Tyrell explain to Richard that ‘The chaplain of the Tower hath buried them; / But how or in what place I do not know.’
In 1674, during the demolition of a staircase leading to the chapel of the White Tower at the Tower of London, the skeletons of two children were discovered in a chest buried 10 feet deep. Contemporaries were quick to reach the conclusion that they had found the remains of Edward V and his brother and they were later interred in a magnificent urn in the Henry VII Chapel in Westminster Abbey.
Although the discovery matches More’s description of the bodies being buried at the foot of a staircase, 10 feet deep is an extraordinary depth to bury evidence of a crime. It also completely disregards More’s assertion that the bodies were later moved to another more fitting site. It is a remarkable coincidence but hardly conclusive proof that these were the bodies of the two princes and that Richard had killed them. With over 1,000 years of bloody history, the Tower has undoubtedly accumulated a few skeletons in its closets. The 1674 demolition may have unearthed a crime scene, but not necessarily the crime it was attributed to.
In 1933, in an attempt to answer some of the many questions over the whole affair, the skeletal remains were removed from their great urn for examination. Lawrence Tanner, archivist of the Abbey, was present along with William Wright, one of the leading anatomists of his day, and George Northcroft, president of the Dental Association. The conclusion they reached after examination of the bones was that they really were the remains of Edward V and his brother. Furthermore, there was reasonable possibility that the story of suffocation told by More was true. However, since then considerable doubt has been cast on the reliability of their report.
From the start it was assumed the two skeletons were those of the princes and the examination sought to confirm their beliefs. A more scientific approach would be to examine the bones as they were, then use those measurements to determine age and sex, and from that decide if they matched the two princes. No attempt was made to identify the sex of the skeletons, though this can be difficult to establish in pre-pubescent humans.
Most of the investigation focused on an examination of the skulls, looking for evidence of suffocation. Such evidence may not always be obvious even when examining the recently deceased, let alone 500-year-old skeletal remains. Unless the force applied to the face in the moment of suffocation was enough to break fragile bones around the nose or eyes, it seems there would be little evidence to find. Any damage that is observed also has to be carefully checked in case it occurred when the bones were removed from their grave or transferred into the urn.
The report has been re-examined and re-appraised many times since 1933. Modern conclusions vary. The lengths of certain bones and teeth are consistent with the age of the princes (twelve and nine), and the differential between the two sets of bones would appear to be correct for the two brothers. However, as you might expect, there are large margins of error. Opinion is divided as to whether the data recorded by Wright’s team can be used to determine if the two skeletons are in fact related.
If modern techniques were to be applied to the remains, such as radiocarbon dating, it might give a better indication of whether they are remains from the fifteenth century or from a much earlier date. Even if DNA analysis could prove that the remains really are those of the two princes, unless there is obvious damage to the skeletons that would have caused their death, there will be little evidence of how they died, let alone who might be responsible.
Shakespeare was in no doubt that it was Richard who was responsible for the deaths of the two princes. However, the only thing that is certain is that the two boys disappeared after they entered the Tower. Any evidence of their deaths, and who was responsible, is circumstantial. Having said that, the deaths of the two boys in the summer of 1483 on Richard’s orders does seem to be the most likely scenario.
Richard III was never arrested or tried for his crimes, but he didn’t escape justice completely. Richard’s short reign was unpopular and punctuated by rebellions. Things came to a head in 1485 when an army was raised by Henry Tudor. He had no stronger claim to the throne than Richard but he still managed to persuade several lords to come over to his side. Richard as the reigning monarch should have been easily able to raise a large army to crush Henry, but many of those he might have expected to rally to his side, didn’t. Most weren’t quite brave enough to join the opposition either and simply stayed out of things to watch what happened.
Henry and Richard’s forces met at Bosworth. In the play, the night before the battle, all 11 of Richard’s alleged murder victims make another stage appearance as ghosts.11 They come to his tent, recount the crimes he has committed against them and condemn him to death, chanting ‘despair and die’. Shakespeare would have felt it necessary for his audience to see Richard face up to his crimes, even if his feelings of guilt are only momentary. The next morning he shakes off his sense of foreboding and rallies his troops for the coming battle.
The battle itself is summarised by two brief scenes: one showing Richard’s forces are losing, where Richard desperately cries the well-known lines, ‘A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!’, and the following scene where Richard and Henry fight one-on-one and Richard is killed.
In real life the fighting lasted around two hours and by eight o’clock in the morning approximately 1,000 people were dead. Richard had fought bravely but was surrounded by his enemy’s troops and hacked to death. He was the last King of England to personally fight in a battle. His body was recovered from the field and buried with little ceremony.12 The Plantagenet dynasty ended and a new era of peace and prosperity began with the crowning of Henry Tudor as King Henry VII.
There was a powerful sense of justice in Shakespeare’s time. It was truly believed that murderers would always be found out. Even the most successfully hidden crimes, or those whose perpetrators were beyond the reach of the authorities, could not escape divine providence. The truth would always be revealed. Shakespeare portrays Richard’s defeat and death at the Battle of Bosworth as his just deserts. It would never have occurred to Shakespeare to write a whodunit, but in all of the Bard’s bloody murders, as in all good detective novels, the murderer never gets away with it.
Notes
1 Lord Stafford makes an appearance in Henry VI Part III, but in a non-speaking role, where he is reported to have been slain in the Battle of Northampton by the soldiers of Henry VI.
2 Suffolk gets his just deserts: he is later sent into exile but captured by pirates on his way to France and beheaded.
3 Asphyxia roughly translates as ‘without pulse’ but modern use of the word has come to mean ‘without oxygen’.
4 The third type of asphyxia is when chemicals disrupt oxygen processes within the body, such as in cyanide poisoning.
5 After Richard’s death no one was given the title for over 150 years.
6 Divers can train themselves to hold their breath for much longer. The current record stands at 22 minutes and 22 seconds.
7 Examination of Richard’s skeleton has revealed that he had a scoliosis, or curvature of the spine, that would have made his trunk appear shorter, and one shoulder slightly higher than the other, but nothing that couldn’t be disguised by a good tailor. There is no evidence that he had a withered arm or would have limped.
8 Technically Anne and Prince Edward were betrothed and not yet married. Richard in fact did not use honeyed words to win Anne over; he effectively kidnapped the reluctant 16-year-old and kept her prisoner.
9 Shakespeare does not stick to the true chronology of events. Anne lived several years after Richard became King and she became Queen.
10 Malmsey is a fortified sweet wine, for example Madeira.
11 Richard was definitely responsible for five deaths that could be considered murder and was probably behind four others. The remaining two deaths, to get up to Shakespeare’s 11, were nothing to do with Richard and the Bard simply invented his guilt for dramatic purposes.
12 Richard’s notoriety grew, but his physical remains were soon forgotten until they were rediscovered under a car park in Leicester in 2013. Examination of the skeletal remains confirmed the brutal nature of his death. He was reburied in Leicester Cathedral in 2015.