This Week in YouTube March 30
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Hey friends, welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast. This is the weekly highlight reel of videos that I have put out on YouTube. So in case you don't know, you can go over to YouTube and watch all my videos. The channel is History and Coffee, and you can just search for my name as well, Heather Tesco, History and Coffee, and you will get it. And you can subscribe there. Thank you to the many people who already subscribe. And then what I've started doing is

weekly highlight reels of some of the videos that have gone out on YouTube that would be of interest to the podcast listeners as well. So thanks for listening. And you can also, like I said, go over and join me on YouTube history and coffee and search for Heather. And there I am. So let's get right into it. We're going to do another conspiracy theory video. We're going to talk about whether Margaret Beaufort could have killed the princes in the tower. So

This has become a thing in recent years, particularly since like the White Queen series and the Philippa Gregory books, that there's this sort of idea that Margaret Beaufort could have potentially killed the princes in the tower. And there's like a whole group of people who very, very firmly believe this.

I do not. And I'm going to talk about why not. If you do, more power to you. You are allowed to. I would like to hear your thoughts as to why in the comment. You can let me know. But we are going to talk about it from my perspective as to why I do not think she did and why I think it's a conspiracy theory.

Somebody lays out a really convincing argument in the comments below. Maybe we can revisit it. But yeah, this is basically why she didn't. We'll see. Maybe I'm willing to be convinced if I don't know. I don't actually know if I'm willing to be convinced. I suppose I am. I'm willing to look at it if somebody makes a convincing argument. All right. Did Margaret Beaufort really kill the prince and the princess in the tower? I can talk.

It's one of the most persistent conspiracy theories in the Wars of the Roses was Lady Margaret Beaufort, the pious and determined mother of Henry VII, the mastermind behind the disappearance and presumed murder of Edward V and his younger brother, Richard, Duke of York. This idea has gained traction in recent years, fueled, like I said, by historical fiction like Philippa Gregory's The White Queen, which portrays Margaret as calculating a ruthless woman willing to do anything to put her son on the throne.

And of course, where there's a vacuum of evidence, myths tend to flourish.

But here's the problem. There's absolutely no contemporary evidence linking Margaret to the crime. Not a whisper in 15th century chronicles, not a single accusation from her rivals, not even a hint in the Tudor propaganda machine that worked overtime to smear Richard III's reputation after his death. Nobody even mentioned that it was an idea that needed to even be debunked or thought about. It wasn't a thing that people considered.

The theory is not rooted in any kind of fact. It's a modern invention built on hindsight and speculation. So let's take a closer look. Could Margaret have had a motive? Possibly. Could she have had the means? Unlikely. And would she have had the opportunity? This is where the theory completely falls apart.

So where did the theory come from? For centuries, the prime suspect in the disappearance of the princes has been their uncle, Richard III. Even the earlier Tudor accounts like Sir Thomas More and then Shakespeare pinned the blame squarely on him.

Of course, you could also say that's Tudor propaganda, and that's what Ricardians would say. Then, in the 17th century, a biographer attempted to rehabilitate Richard's reputation and instead floated the vague suggestion that an unnamed countess may have been responsible. That's the first recorded mention of Margaret Beaufort in relation to the crime, but notably, no evidence was offered to support it.

Fast forward a few hundred years, the idea is dusted off again by historical novelists eager to craft a compelling villain. And there's no doubt at all that Margaret makes for an intriguing character, deeply religious, pious, fiercely ambitious for her son, and adept at political maneuvering. But ambition is not a crime, and it certainly isn't murder. The explosion of Ricardian revisionism, the movement that seeks to exonerate Richard III of all wrongdoing, has only added fuel to the fire.

To some Richard supporters, the idea that he could have ordered the deaths of his own nephews is unacceptable. And so the theory shifts. Maybe Margaret did it. Maybe Henry Tudor did it. Maybe somebody else in yearly was responsible. But again, there's no evidence, just a desire to redirect blame.

Margaret certainly benefited from the prince's disappearance. With them out of the way, her son Henry Tudor could strengthen his claim to the throne through a proposed marriage to Elizabeth of York. Had the boys remained alive, they would have been a potential rallying point for Yorkist resistance. But benefiting from something doesn't mean that you caused it. And if we're playing that game, there was another person who benefited even more, and that's Richard III.

At the time of their disappearance, Richard had already declared his nephews illegitimate and had taken the throne for himself. So a lot of people say, well, he didn't have a need to kill them because he already declared them illegitimate. So why would he have to kill them? But as long as they remained alive, they were a threat.

After all, the English people had accepted boy kings before. Henry VI had been crowned when he was only nine months old. Even if Richard ruled as a regent, the princes would still have been a figurehead for opposition. And we saw that when there was, in fact, that attempt to rescue them, and that's where they disappeared shortly thereafter.

More importantly, Richard had something that Margaret did not: access to the Tower. Margaret, despite all of her wealth and her influence, had no way of reaching the princes. She wasn't a member of Richard's inner circle. Her husband, Lord Stanley, while politically significant, also wasn't in a position to intervene in the Tower's security. And that brings us to the biggest hole in the theory of her being responsible, which was: how on earth did she pull it off?

the princes were being held in the tower under direct control of richard the third after their initial public appearances their visibility decreased until they disappeared entirely and the last recorded sighting of them was in the late summer of fourteen eighty three at which point they were still in the tower guarded by men personally responsible and loyal to richard

So, exactly how was Margaret supposed to have reached them? One argument is that she could have bribed the guards, but this assumes that Richard's hand-picked men, trusted enough to guard the two deposed princes, would be willing to risk everything, including their heads, by betraying the king in favor of a woman who, at the time, was still very much on the wrong side of history. Margaret was a wealthy woman, but...

bribing people to commit outright treason in a case this high profile would have been almost impossible. The consequence of getting caught wouldn't mean just death, it would mean the ruin of entire families. Others suggest that her husband, Lord Stanley, could have played a role. But while Stanley was politically powerful, he was not in Richard's closest circle of advisors. He didn't control the tower. There's no evidence he had any access to the boys.

Stanley was an expert at hedging his bets. His greatest skill was actually keeping himself just valuable enough to whoever was in power while never actually fully committing to any side until the last possible moment. That's exactly what he did at Bosworth. The idea that he would recklessly involve himself in a crime of this magnitude against a king that he was still nominally serving doesn't add up.

Then there's the biggest problem of all. If Margaret was responsible, why didn't anybody say anything about it?

If Margaret or Henry Tudor had been responsible for the prince's death, Richard would have had every reason to make it public. He was already engaged in a propaganda war against Henry, portraying him as a usurper with an illegitimate claim. If he had any proof, even a believable accusation, that Henry's faction had orchestrated the murders, he would have used it to destroy Henry's credibility before he ever even set foot into England.

Instead, Richard remained silent on the matter. He never announced an investigation into their deaths. He never presented bodies. He never blamed Henry, Margaret, or anybody else. And when Henry took the throne, he didn't declare Richard guilty of the murders either. If Henry had discovered proof that Richard had done it, he could have used it to further vilify his defeated rival. But he didn't. Instead, the Tudor regime remained vague about what happened, which suggests that even they didn't know for certain.

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That in and of itself tells us something. By the time Henry arrived in England, the boys were long gone. It had been close to two years since they were seen. They were no longer a political consideration. And they would be later with pretenders coming to the throne, people saying that they were the boys. But at that point, they hadn't. Whether Richard had quietly killed them or they died from some type of illness or whether something else happened entirely, they weren't a factor anymore. And Henry's actions like legitimizing Edward IV's children and marrying Elizabeth of York

only made sense if the boys were already dead. So why does Margaret Beaufort keep getting blamed? A lot of it comes down to the popularity of historical fiction, particularly The White Queen, which reintroduced the theory to a mainstream audience. Philippa Gregory's portrayal of Margaret as a fanatically religious and politically ruthless woman was compelling, but it actually wasn't based on any kind of historical evidence. And once an idea takes hold in pop culture, it, of course, can be very difficult to separate the fiction from the fact.

Then, of course, there's the Ricardian factor. Richard III has had some passionate defenders ever since The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tay in the 1950s. I've had them on the channel. And in fact, I get comments about it when I have some of them on the channel. This argues that he was unfairly maligned by later Tudor writers, which it's very true that Richard actually was. It's a fair point. Richard was actually a pretty fair king. And especially in the North, he was very much beloved. So I'm not trying to take anything away from Richard as a king.

I do think he had something to do with the princess and the tower, and I specifically don't think Margaret did. So many Ricardians reject the idea that he could have murdered his nephews, which leaves them searching for alternative culprits. Margaret, as the mother of Richard's main rival, becomes a convenient scapegoat. I actually think that the Ricardians and Margaret Beaufort fans like me could actually live in harmony because...

just because Richard didn't do it doesn't mean that Margaret did do it. Maybe nobody did it and the idea is that some of the pretenders were actually true. Maybe that holds up. I don't know. We just, there can be other ways of thinking outside the box and looking at it that don't necessarily pit the

the Margaret Beaufort fans like myself against the Ricardian fans. So I just want to put that out there that we actually could get along. Anyway, this argument falls into the trap of assuming that because Richard shouldn't have killed them, that means he didn't.

The truth is, we don't actually know what happened to the princes in the tower. There's no definitive proof that Richard had them killed. But, of course, the simplest answer is usually the correct one. They were under Richard's custody. They were a threat to his reign. They disappeared when he was king. No other suspect had the same combination of motive, opportunity, and access.

Could Richard have allowed them to die of illness? Possibly. Could someone within his circle have taken the initiative without direct orders? Also possibly. It happened with Henry II and Thomas Beckett. But

All of that has nothing to do with Margaret Beaufort. The idea that Margaret Beaufort, a woman who had no access to the tower, no standing orders over the guards, no known conspirators inside Richard's court, somehow orchestrated their death is just beyond improbable. It's impossible. So no matter what happened to the princess, and I don't know the answer to what happened to the princess, I think there's a lot of really intriguing theories, and I'm willing to listen to all of them.

None of that matters because I do know, the one thing I do know is that Lady Margaret Beaufort did not kill them. So the princes were probably doomed from the moment Richard seized the throne. Whether he gave the order directly or whether their fate was sealed by political necessity, or even if they lived on and survived and Lambert, Simnel, and Perkin Warbeck really were them, either way, he was the one with the power to make them disappear.

Once they were gone, Margaret Beaufort's son became the only viable alternative for those who opposed Richard. That doesn't mean she killed them. That just means that she played really well the hand that she was dealt. So there you go. That's me debunking the idea that Margaret Beaufort killed the princes in the tower. This is my sort of editorial for the week.

When we think of Tudor-era travelers, we often picture young noblemen on like an early version of the Grand Tour or merchants crisscrossing Europe or even ambassadors navigating courtly intrigues and diplomacy. But what about women? You might assume that travel for women in the 16th and 17th centuries was rare, dangerous, or even frowned upon. And you'd be partially right. But new research is changing that narrative.

I recently found a study that uncovered evidence that over 2,000 English women traveled to continental Europe between 1558 and 1630, and their reasons for travel were just as diverse as those of their male counterparts. Some fled religious persecution, others followed husbands or family members, and some traveled for adventure, diplomacy, or even health reasons.

So let's dive into this overlooked world of Tudor women on the move. For centuries, historians assumed that women in early modern England rarely traveled abroad. After all, society discouraged women from independent movement. Laws like the Statute of Confinement from 1593 even limited how far Catholics could travel from home. But official records, port registries, and diplomatic correspondence tell a different story. Women were on the move.

Alethea Talbot, the Countess of Arundel, was one such traveler. She was a collector of art and books, and she traveled extensively shaping taste and culture at the English court. Ambassadors' wives, known as ambassadresses, also played crucial roles, not just accompanying their husbands but actively managing diplomatic households and influencing negotiations.

So why were women traveling? The study found that women traveled for a variety of reasons. There was religion. Catholic women in particular traveled to escape persecution in England or to join convents in Europe. A database of English nuns reveals nearly 4,000 women who settled in continental religious houses between 1600 and 1800.

Then there was diplomacy. Women in ambassadorial households weren't just silent companions. They played active roles in negotiation, gift-giving, and intelligence gathering. There was also commerce. Women connected to merchant families or trade networks often traveled between England and bustling European ports.

What about health? The town of Spa in Belgium became a hotspot for English women seeking medicinal waters. Women from both Protestant and Catholic backgrounds visited, making it an early example of a multi-faith international health resort. Finally, family and marriage. Many traveled with husbands or to arrange strategic marriages, reinforcing alliances across Europe.

So how did people react to women traveling? Well, some men were scandalized. Literature from the period condemned wide-wandering women, a phrase dripping with moral disapproval. Writers feared that travel would lead women into temptation or make them too independent. But by the early 1600s, attitudes were shifting. As more women traveled, their presence abroad became harder to ignore. And in some circles, women travelers were even celebrated. After all, travel required courage,

resilience, and intelligence, qualities that didn't go unnoticed even in a male-dominated world. The idea that Tudor women were static, passive figures has long dominated historical narratives, but this research challenges that. These women weren't just spectators, they were participants in the great movements of their time. Whether escaping persecution, fostering diplomacy, or managing businesses, they carved out spaces for themselves in a world that wasn't always welcoming to female mobility.

And that's what makes this discovery so important. It shifts our understanding of who was shaping Tudor England's relationship with Europe. It wasn't just kings and diplomats. It was also the women whose footsteps left invisible trails across the continent. So the next time you think about Tudor travel, remember the roads, the ports, even the diplomatic calls weren't just for men. Women were there too, obviously, sometimes in the shadows, sometimes in the spotlight, but always moving forward.

I'm actually personally super interested in this topic because when I was in my early 20s, I moved to London by myself. I didn't know anybody there. And I moved all by my lonesome.

And I actually started a very early travel group online called Nomad Chick, Nomad Chick for women travelers. And for a long time, my username and my kind of at username on all my early social social media like that I started like on MySpace and stuff way back in the day was Nomad Chick.

And I still kind of embrace my inner nomad chick. So I hope you enjoyed thinking about women travelers. If you are into travel, where do you want to go? I would love to know where you want to go next. I'm thinking about it because planning my summer, I think. Thanks so much for listening to this week's YouTube highlights. Remember, you can go over and subscribe. History and Coffee, Heather Tesco. You will find me there.

And we'll be back again next week with more highlights from what went out on YouTube throughout the week. Thanks so much. Have a great week.

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