Can new evidence clear the name of Richard III?

“He may not have killed the princes in the Tower, according to a team led by the woman who found the king’s remains under a car park,” said an article in the Daily Telegraph over the holiday period. “Researchers claim to have found evidence that suggests Edward, the older boy, was not murdered but instead allowed to live on his half-brother’s land under a false name.”

This theory has been developed by the team of Phillipa Langley, who grew up in Darlington and who, in 2012, found Richard III’s body buried in Leicester. After that success, Ms Langley launched the Missing Princes Project to find out to what happened to Richard’s nephews whom he imprisoned in the Tower of London. The project was launched at Middleham castle in 2016, and its new theory suggests that the boy who should have been king lived out the rest of his days in deepest Devon looking after deer under the watchful eye of one of Richard’s favourites, who came from Ripon.

The intriguing, if a little confusing, story of royal intrigue and lust for power starts when Richard’s brother, Edward IV, was on the throne. Richard governed the north of England for him from his bases at Middleham, near Leyburn, and Sheriff Hutton, near York. Much of Yorkshire was under his spell and he was Lord of Barnard Castle – indeed, a large, illuminated version of Richard’s white boar emblem featured among Barney’s Christmas lights this year.

Edward IV died on April 9, 1483, and his 12-year-old son, Edward, succeeded to the throne. Given the boy’s tender years, his uncle Richard became Lord Protector to keep the country safe until the coronation.

Richard put him and his brother, nine-year-old Richard of Shrewsbury, in the Tower of London where they were overseen by the Constable of the Tower, Sir Robert Brackenbury, who owned Selaby near Gainford.

Last year's Richard III exhibition at the Yorkshire Museum in York, with the 16th Century portrait of him on loan from the National Portrait Gallery centre stage

The storyline then takes so many extraordinary twists that 100 years later Shakespeare turned it into a play which trashed Richard’s reputation, because the supposedly loyal and caring uncle discovered "evidence" that Edward IV had secretly had a first marriage which made the princes illegitimate. They were unable to take the throne and so Richard was left as the only heir. On July 6, 1483, he was crowned Richard III, and when he returned to Yorkshire to celebrate and the princes mysteriously disappeared.

A story is told that with Sir Robert Brackenbury turning a blind eye, Miles Forrest, the Keeper of the King’s Wardrobe from Barnard Castle, and John Dighton, from North Yorkshire, smothered them with sheets to prevent them from ever pursuing their claim to the throne, although their bodies have never been discovered.

The new theory, though, says that Richard wasn’t that callous. It says that on March 1, 1484, he did a deal with the princes’ mother, Elizabeth Woodville, which guaranteed their silence in return for their safety, and on March 3, 1484, Richard’s favourite, Robert Markenfield, was sent to Devon to prepare a secret new life for the boy Edward.

Robert Markenfield and his older brother, Sir Thomas, came from Markenfield Hall, a medieval moated manor house near Ripon, which is now a visitor attraction and wedding venue billed as “the loveliest place you have never heard of”. The Markenfields were among the Yorkshire gentry under Richard III’s spell.

Markenfield Hall, near Ripon, was the home of the Markenfield family from the early 14th Century until it was confiscated from them after the 1569 Rising of the North

When young Edward arrived in Devon, Robert gave him his new identity as a Welshman called John Evans who was the “parker” of the Royal Coldridge Deer Park – an estate which belonged to Thomas Grey, the Marquess of Dorset, who had the same mother as the boy. Quietly, John Evans settled into his new life, looking after deer.

Even when Richard III died at the Battle of Bosworth on August 22, 1485, and was buried beneath what would become a car park, John Evans tended his deer. When Henry Tudor seized the crown and married Edward IV’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, to cement his claim, John Evans didn’t mention the fact that he should really be king, but instead carried on in the deer park.

Richard's skull found beneath a Leicester car park showing terrific facial injuries - he is said to have died at the Battle 0f Bosworth after losing his helmet and coming under a hail of blows from vicious medieval weapons. Sir Robert Brackenbury of

Only in 1511, as he neared the natural end of his life, did he began to wonder “what if…”. He paid for a chantry to be built at the Coldridge village church, which he filled with Da Vinci Code style clues for future generations to interpret.

There’s a picture of him in the stained glass window holding a crown to indicate he was the rightful king but was never crowned; in his ermine there are 41 little deer which indicate that he, like Edward, was 41-years-old in 1511; his name is mis-spelled to show that EVans really refers to him being Edward V, and on his tomb a medieval grafittist has chiselled the word “king” upside down to ensure everyone understood the message.

“To have all these symbolic details in such a remote and inaccessible church, which in 1500 would have only been accessed by cart track, suggests the presence of a person of importance,” the lead researcher told the Telegraph. “An ideal location for Thomas Grey, with the probable agreement of Richard III or later Henry VII, to place his half-brother.”

Ms Langley sounded a little non-committal when she said: “A number of the specialist police investigators working within the Missing Princes Project have told us to always investigate when a coincidence occurs – and here, intriguingly, there are quite a number of them.”

Philippa Langley, a former pupil of Hummersknott School in Darlington and the originator of the Looking for Richard III Project and the Missing Princes Project, with a model of Richard III's face

Emeritus Professor Tony Pollard, of Teesside University, who has spent decades researching and writing about the Wars of the Roses, is not so sure.

“The fact that it is an obscure village and church is not really that significant,” he says. “There are other obscure churches around the country with 'surprising' connections and images.

“One has to concede, however, that the whole story is intriguing and that one can understand why Ricardians are keen to turn it into evidence that Edward V survived, but one does have to ask oneself why after 1485, this adolescent who knew he was the rightful king of England just meekly spent the next 27 years pretending he was an obscure Welshman; or why those who were in the know – and who later created this coded message – did not try to exploit it. All he needed to do was to slip off to the Netherlands and present himself to his aunt Margaret, the dowager duchess of Burgundy, who would have welcomed him with open arms, as she cynically did the impostor who pretended to be his younger brother.

“The common sense and traditional interpretation is that there are two memorials at Coldridge: one an effigy of John Evans; another a stained glass image of Edward V as an uncrowned boy king put up by an unknown donor. There is a similar image at St George's Chapel Windsor.

“But it remains the case, despite this imaginative reinterpretation, that Richard III almost certainly had his nephews killed, just as he executed others in the summer of 1483 who stood in his way.”