Lucy Worsley: 'Richard III claims don't stand up to logical scrutiny'

Lucy Worsley has shed new light on all sorts of historical events during the second season of her BBC Two show, Lucy Worsley Investigates.

Yet while the new episodes delve into famous moments from England's past, including the Norman Conquest and the Gunpowder Plot, it's a cold case she covered in the first series that's generating the most discussion.

In 2022 Worsley looked into the mystery surrounding the Princes in Tower, an infamous 1483 event where 12-year-old Edward V and his nine-year-old brother Richard disappeared from The Tower of London following the death of their father, Edward IV.

It was long suspected that Edward IV's younger brother, Richard III, who went on to take the throne later that year, had done away with his nephews and after studying the evidence, Lucy agreed with that theory.

However following the 2012 discovery of Richard III's remains in a Leicester car park, in an excavation led by Philippa Langley, the Richard III Society has argued the Yorkist monarch did not order the death of his nephews.

In a 2023 Channel 4 documentary, The Princes in the Tower: The New Evidence, Langley presented documents suggesting that rather than being killed, the princes were secretly sent away and reappeared in the reign of Henry VII, as Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simnel.

Yet Worsley says watching the documentary has not changed her mind...

"I feel the same as I did before," she says. "They say that they found some evidence that the princes weren't killed and claimed these two figures were the not dead princes. But I'm like, what? We know that the pretenders existed. We know people at the time put it about that they were the little princes embodied. That was the whole point of the rebellions that were attached to those figures. So I was I was left slightly confused by the rabbit hole that they've gone down."

Worsley also says the makers of the show looked at history in a very particular way.

"They have a very distinctive way of seeing the world that just doesn't seem to stand up to logical scrutiny," she explains. "I would expect to find evidence that people at the time believed the pretenders really were the princes who survived, and that's what they found. So for me, that doesn't change anything. It's certainly not evidence that the boys survived, the evidence did not link the pretenders in any convincing way to the actual two boys who disappeared in the tower.

"And then another thing that often surprises me is that historians say, 'Well, there's no evidence that Richard III murdered his nephews', and I think that there wouldn't be would there? When Lenin killed the Romanovs, he made sure that there was no paper trail. I think it's very good practice if you're going to carry out political murder to make sure people can't pin the crime to you. So had evidence been discovered, Richard the Third would have just been making a rookie error!"

Lucy Worsley Investigates seasons 1 & 2 is available on the BBC iPlayer now.