Anne Mowbray: the Princess in the Police Station and the Princes in the Tower
Did you know that in December 1964 when the small lead coffin containing the Anne Mowbray,
Fig 1. Cutting from the Evening News 11/12/64.
a Plantagenet princess was discovered by workmen, it ended up in Leman Street Police Station? Earlier that day workmen excavating new foundations on the site of the church of the Abbey of St Clare in Tower Hamlets had discovered a burial vault, which they broke into and then extracted Anne’s anthropomorphic lead coffin. Next, they telephoned the press and then they posed for photographs with the coffin (see Fig 1).
Later the same day the workmen handed the coffin over to the police, who suspected that it was historic, so they gave it to Dr Francis Celoria, Field Officer of the London Museum, who took it away in the back of his Land Rover (see LAMAS Trans 69, 2018, p. xiii for a tribute to Celoria’s contribution to London archaeology). Celoria realized from the Latin inscription that the coffin contained the remains of the eight-year-old Anne Mowbray, the Duchess of York, who had died in 1481 (Fig 2). She was the child bride of Richard, Duke of York (the younger son of Edward IV).
Fig 2. Anne Mowbray’s lead coffin (1.43m long), notice the Latin inscription on the plaque wrapped around the top half (© Museum of London).
Celoria realized that this was very rare opportunity to carry out a scientific study of a named medieval individual (see LAMAS Trans 67, 2015, p. 227-60 for further details about Anne’s burial and its analysis).
Anne Mowbray was the only child and heir of John (VII) Mowbray, fourth Duke of Norfolk (died 1476). Edward IV decided that as Anne was extremely rich that she should marry his younger son Richard, to enrich his own family. A papal dispensation was required for the marriage as Richard was aged four and Anne only five, so they were far too young to legally marry and they were also distant cousins. The two young children were married on the 15 January 1478 in St Stephen’s Chapel in Westminster Palace. Anne’s marriage was imagined by James Northcote in1821 in a dramatic ‘history’ painting (Fig 3). Anne died in November 1481, shortly before her ninth birthday.
Fig 3. The marriage of Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York to Lady Anne Mowbray, by James Northcote RA (© Royal Collection).
Her cause of death is not documented and her skeletal remains showed no sign of disease. Interestingly, analysis of her hair revealed that some of her roots were atrophied, generally this is a sign ill-health (ditto LAMAS Trans 67, p. 243; Fig 4).
Fig 4. Anne Mowbray’s shoulder length hair (© Museum of London).
There was no body tissue present and generally very poor organic preservation inside Anne’s coffin (with the exception of her hair) as it had been punctured centuries before it was discovered (perhaps when it was moved in c.1502, see below). Anne was initially buried inside Westminster Abbey, but in 1502-03 when this part of the abbey was demolished to make space for Henry VII’s new mausoleum, it is believed that her remains were relocated to the church of the Abbey of St Clare, where her mother Elizabeth (died in 1506) was then living.
The discovery of Anne’s remains in 1964 created huge interest in the press (Fig 1), which can be compared with the coverage of the 2012 discovery of the remains of Richard III in Leicester -‘the king in the car park’ (ditto p. 251 – appendix). Unfortunately, Celoria’s planned programme of analytical work on Anne’s burial was curtailed by legal issues, but despite these difficulties studies of her coffin, skeletal remains, teeth and hair were undertaken (ditto p. 239-45). A facial reconstruction of Anne using existing data was produced in 2016 by Amy Thornton of Dundee University (Fig 5).
Fig 5. The facial reconstruction of Anne Mowbray (reproduced by kind permission of the late John Ashdown-Hill).
In 1965 Anne’s remains were reburied in the Duke of Buckingham’s Chapel (situated at the east end of Henry VII’s mausoleum) Westminster Abbey.
The Fate of Anne’s Husband – the younger of the Princes in the Tower
The unexpected death of Edward IV in April 1483, created a crisis as his older son who was proclaimed Edward V was only aged 12. Therefore, Edward IV’s younger brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester assumed the role as Protector. Things started to go wrong when it was claimed that Edward IV’s clandestine marriage in 1464 to the widow Elizabeth Grey (née Woodville) was bigamous due to a pre-existing marriage contract and therefore their children were illegitimate and consequently barred from the throne. Richard used his position as Protector to make himself king in June 1483
having persuaded parliament that his nephews were illegitimate, which avoided proper legal scrutiny of the allegations. However, Richard III realised that the disinherited Edward V and his younger brother Richard, Duke of York were still a threat to his regime, so he imprisoned them in the Tower of London. In July it is believed there was an attempt to rescue the two princes from the Tower. It has been suggested that this failed conspiracy encouraged Richard III to have the boys murdered. By 1484 it was rumoured that the ‘Princes in the Tower’ had been murdered by their uncle.
The fate of the two princes has been the subject of much speculation and the discovery in 1674 within the Tower of London of the partial skeletons of two juveniles is often interpreted as the remains of the two missing princes, but this has never been proved. In 1678 on the orders of Charles I the remains of these two juveniles were reburied as royalty in Westminster Abbey. In 1933 their teeth and skeletal remains were examined, indicating that these two individuals are about the right age to be the two missing princes (ditto p. 234). In the 1980s the published dental and osteological data was reassessed by Theya Molleson confirming that these two individuals are about the right age to be the two princes (see London Archaeologist 5, 1987, p. 258-62). However, the 1933 osteological examination of two juveniles was unsatisfactory by modern standards. For instance, their gender was not established. A modern osteological examination is needed to confirm their age and gender and it also should include the radiocarbon dating of each skeleton (to establish their antiquity) and the extraction of the mitochondrial DNA to confirm if they really are the missing princes (as if they are then their Y chromosome will be identical to that of Richard III as they are descended from the same paternal line).
In 2023 Philippa Langley (who started the search for Richard III’s grave) published a book entitled The Princes in the Tower: solving history’s greatest cold case. She argues that in 1483 Edward V and his brother Richard escaped from captivity in the Tower and went aboard. Subsequently they both made unsuccessful comebacks as the ‘pretenders’. She argues that Henry VII to discredit these rivals for the throne claimed they were Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, something that other historians dispute (see the review of her book in LAMAS Trans 74, 2023, p. 387).
Since Philippa’s attempt to exonerate Richard III of the murder of his nephews was published, a new piece of damming evidence has been published by Professor Tim Thornton (see ‘Sir William Capell and a royal chain: and the afterlives (and death ) of King Edward V’ History (2024) 109, issue 388,p. 445-60, available online via Wiley library). He discovered that listed in Lady
Margaret Cappel’s will of 1522 is a chain of office or state that had belonged to Edward V. This chain is the only surviving evidence for any of Edward V’s personal possessions. Perhaps the Cappell family obtained this chain from Sir James Tyrell, a brother-in-law of Lady Margaret’s husband. Tyrell was named by Sir Thomas More in his History of King Richard III (written in c.1513-20) as the person who organized the murder of the princes on the orders of Richard III. Traditionally More’s history has been dismissed as Tudor propaganda intended to discredit Richard III, but Professor Thornton has argued that as there is considerable evidence concerning the careers in royal service of Tyrell and his two associates John Dighton and Miles Forest that More’s account of the murder of the princes is plausible. (See ‘More on a Murder: The Deaths of the ‘Princes in the Tower’, and Historiographical Implications for the Regimes of Henry VII and Henry VIII’ History (2021) 106, issue 369, p. 4-25, available online via Open Access). According to More’s account (which was dramatized by Shakespeare in Richard III) Dighton and Miles one night smothered the two princes in their beds and then buried their bodies nearby ‘at the stair-foot’ (Fig 6).
Fig 6. An 18th-century engraving depicting the murder of the sleeping princes (© Creative Commons).
More believed that the Constable of the Tower’s priest subsequently had their remains reinterred in a secret location. More’s description of the initial burial place of the princes closely matches the spot inside the Inmost Ward of the Tower where the skeletal remains of two juveniles were discovered in 1674. It seems that the only way that the identification of these two juveniles as the missing princes can be either proven or disproven is by their scientific study (see above). As Westminster Abbey is a royal church, any analytical work on the ex-situ remains of the two juveniles would have to be approved by the sovereign. The late queen turned down a number of requests for analytical work. However, Charles III apparently is prepared to support a new analytical programme (see ‘King “backs DNA test” to end mystery’ Times 15/10/22 p. 23). Watch this website and the LAMAS Newsletter for updates on this medieval mystery.
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