Year 11 Colloquium: The Princes in the Tower – an Insight into English history’s greatest mystery
Last Friday lunchtime School Archivist, author, historian and geographer Mr Andrew Beattie entertained the members of the Year 11 Colloquium with his talk about the Princes in the Tower.
As befits someone with interests in both disciplines, the talk featured place as well as attempting to unravel the past; we swept from Ludlow to Bosworth, Stoney Stratford to the Tower of London and perhaps most poignantly a car park in Leicester. In his talk Mr Beattie examined the strengths and weaknesses of the various theories about what might have happened to the Princes. He considered the evidence from a recent book by Phillipa Langley, The Princes in the Tower: Solving History’s Greatest Cold Case, which formed the basis of a 2023 Channel Four documentary, and also drew from his own 2019 book Following in the Footsteps of the Princes in the Tower (Pen & Sword Books).
Perhaps most appropriately in a talk thinking about the power of myth and subjective history, the story of the unearthing of Richard III’s body in the car park showed what is possible when science, determination and a bit of luck join forces. Perhaps one day these forces may tell us what did happen to the two Princes?
