 Last week on Mystery Monday, we spoke about the disappearance of the Yorkist princes in the tower. These two little boys, one the age of 12 and one the age of 10, were heirs to the throne of England. However, in 1483, nobody saw them ever again. They just disappeared. It had been assumed that their uncle, King Richard III, had something to do with their disappearance. Because with these boys dead and gone, he and his son could take over England. However, in 1491, a young man started making waves in the court of Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy. This young man claimed to be the youngest of the two boys who went missing in the tower. History books call him the Great Pretender. However, we're not so sure he was pretending. But before you go any further, please hit that subscribe button and give us a like. Again, a very special thank you to all of our patrons who have really helped us get this channel up and going. If you would like to join our Patreon program, there is a link down in the description box. Welcome to Esoteric Atlanta. My name is Bryce and today on Mystery Monday, we're going to be talking about the mysterious Perkins Warbeck. The appearance of the two little princes in the tower is just one little story from the whole War of the Roses. Now, I have covered the War of the Roses on this channel and I will attach that video down below, as well as our video from last week as well, if you need to be caught up on to what was going down to cause these little boys to disappear. The War of the Roses ended with the Tudor line coming into power. The Tudor dynasty from the royal family is one of the most infamous dynasties. We're talking like King Henry VIII and all of his wives. We're talking Queen Elizabeth I, who brought about the Elizabethan age, but as most of us are well aware, even though we have different dynasties within the English royal family, it all is pretty much the same family starting with the Plantagenets. King Henry VII, who was the first of the Tudors, married Elizabeth of York. She was the daughter of King Edward IV. Now, as I said last week, Henry Tudors, Henry VII, his claim to the throne was rather dicey. Yes, he was a Lancaster. Yes, he was very distantly related to King Edward III. However, he wasn't the closest one to take the crown. By marrying Elizabeth of York, King Edward IV's daughter, it secured him on the crown. It meant that his children would carry this Plantagenet bloodline or this royal bloodline, even though they were the Tudor dynasty, they were still very much Plantagenets. Now, to think about Elizabeth of York, his wife, the Queen, she was sister to the two little boys that were kept in the tower. She was much older than them. As we said last week, her mother, Elizabeth Woodville, and her father, King Edward IV, were quite fertile. There were a lot of kids. The boys came later on. Now, even though the two princes, two Yorkist princes in the tower, disappeared long before the Battle of Bosworth, where Henry Tudor killed Richard III and took the crown, if they had shown back up, that meant that Henry's reign would have been illegitimate, right? The crown would have to go to one of these little boys since it goes from King to a son. It didn't matter that Henry Tudor was married to their sister. If they showed back up, it was game over for Henry Tudor. So as we mentioned last week, when Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne, Henry VII's granddaughter, and Shakespeare wrote his play about King Richard III and Thomas More was out there writing stuff, it was all propaganda because they feared that their little boys were still alive and still had heirs that could come and take the throne at any minute. They needed those boys to be scrubbed off of the pages of history. Now, before I started researching Perkin Warbeck, I was under the assumption that he literally was a pretender, that he took the opportunity to say that he was the youngest son of King Edward IV. Richard was the youngest son of King Edward IV to try to take the crown for himself. I just believed the history books. However, now I'm not so sure. Was he really Richard? So as I said in the opening in 1491, this young man started making waves at the court of Margaret Duchess of Burgundy. Now, Margaret lived in what would be modern-day Belgium. And you see, Margaret was the sister of King Richard III and King Edward IV. This means that Margaret was aunt to our aunt, as some people say, to these two little boys that were in the tower. She was also a Yorkist. Now, she made no bones about her distaste for Henry Tudor. After all, Henry Tudor had murdered her brother, King Richard III, and swept in and took the throne for himself, marrying her niece to solidify his reign. Well, the story goes that with the little boys in the tower that the oldest boy, Edward, who was King Edward V at 12 years old, was murdered by some of the landcastrian people. And that King Richard III knew about this. And so he helped his youngest nephew, who was also named Richard, who is now this man saying he is Richard, escape to the European continent to live with his sister, Margaret. Of course, this paints King Richard III in a pretty good light, that he did what he had to do to protect his young nephew by getting the 10 year old all the way into the safety of family. The 10 year old, Richard, spent all these years then with Margaret in her court, where she trained him to be a king. By 1491, he was ready to go back and claim the crown for the Yorkist, his rightful place on the throne. Now, this man who has been labeled the pretender by history, here's something that really struck me as interesting, something I didn't know before. You see, not only did this young man, who was claiming to be the prince Richard, have the support of Margaret, the sister, the aunt, but he also had the support of other European kings and emperors. One of those kings was King Charles VIII of France. Now, as I heard one commentator say, this guy, this guy claiming to be Richard, was quite a thorn in Henry Tudor's side. You see, Henry Tudor was aware of him before he even invaded England, that this kid was walking around in the continent of Europe and saying he was this prince Richard and that he was actually heir to the throne of England. Now, because King Charles VIII of France had such support behind this young man, Henry Tudor had to send an army to invade France. Yes, I know France and England are always kind of invading each other. However, this was strictly so that this King Charles VIII would literally stop supporting this guy who's claiming to be the rightful heir to the throne. And in 1492, England basically won that little invasion and forced the King of France to sign a treaty saying that they would no longer support this young man. So they signed the treaty under duress. I feel like they did believe he was who he said he was, but they just got invaded. So they kind of had to go along with the flow of what King Henry Tudor wanted. Another rather important person in this timeline that supported this young man being who he claimed he was was the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian. Now, at this point, there is no Protestantism in England. It's it's that's coming, but it's not there yet. So this was rather big for King Henry VII to know that this young man had the support of the Holy Roman Emperor who technically had more power than just a King. Well, on the 3rd of July in 1495, this young man claiming to be the missing Prince Richard invaded England. He they he and 500 of his own soldiers landed in Dill in the area of Kent. Now, the Tudor army was there waiting for them. Apparently they got defeated pretty quickly and the only reason why this young man claiming to be Richard survived is because he had not gotten off the boat yet. So he quickly did it about face first going to Ireland where there was a lot of Yorkist support and then making his way over to Scotland where he had the support of the Scottish King King James IV. In fact, King James IV of Scotland was so convinced that this was legitimately the missing Prince Richard that he gave this young man a royal wedding to a noble woman named Lady Catherine Gordon. Now you don't just go off marrying noble women to commoners, right? Like that was a pretty big deal. King James IV of Scotland also provided this supposed Prince Richard with help and aid from the Scottish army to once again invade England this time from the North. Unfortunately, once again, the Tudor army defeated the Scottish army, sending this mysterious Prince Richard back to Ireland where there again was a lot of Yorkist support after the defeat of the Scottish army by the Tudor army. The Tudor army, the Tudor government was then forced to raise taxes on the citizens to pay back what they spent for this little war against this guy that was claiming to be the rightful heir to the throne. Well, as we all know, when taxes are raised, people get pretty upset and the people of Cornwall in England got real upset and so they started to create an uprising against the Tudor dynasty. Well, our mysterious Prince Richard took this opportunity to join the people of Cornwall to finally take down King Henry VII. He came into Cornwall with 120 of his own men and they met up with 6,000 other men to eventually invade London. There's a very famous story of the people of Cornwall cheering Richard IV on already calling him King Richard IV, even though he had not been coronated. They held him up. They paraded him around town celebrating the fact that this long-lost Yorkist Prince was here to take back the throne from this illegitimate King. All seemed to be going well until the royal Tudor army showed up and once again they defeated this third army of this mysterious Prince Richard. Well, Richard at that point turned and ran and hid in an abbey. Again, abbeys at that time were considered like home base. He couldn't go to anybody if they were seeking sanctuary within an abbey. Now, eventually this young man decided to turn himself in. He was dragged through the streets like a common prisoner and thrown into the Tower of London. Now, the interesting thing about this young man, no, we didn't have DNA testing back then, but he looked identical to his father, his supposed father, King Edward IV. And I'm sure this whole situation put his sister Elizabeth of York, the Queen of England, in a very compromising place. I mean, here you have your husband that you were kind of forced to marry, but apparently they ended up having a pretty good relationship. And now this guy is claiming to be your long lost little brother. What do you, what do you do? How do you respond? Once in the Tower of London, King Henry VII called upon the doctor that the little boys had when they were younger. The doctor was there to examine this young man to see if he could recognize him as the missing Prince Richard. Now, during this time it is said that he confessed to not being the missing Prince Richard and instead being a commoner by the name of Perkin Warbeck. However, a lot of people believe that this young man was basically tortured to death until he confessed so that his confession isn't a real confession. A lot of people believe this because there's just no way in hell a commoner would have the education that this Perkin Warbeck had. In fact, it is quite clear that he had been raised in a royal court for most of his life. If he was the missing Prince Richard, then he had lived in his father's court for the first 10 years of his life and then gone over to his aunt's court where he spent the last eight or nine years learning from her. This was not an uneducated commoner. He, he knew about music. He could speak different languages. He knew court rules. He knew about how to be a soldier, all in all the identity that he gave in this confession did not match what he was showing within himself. Again, not to mention, he looked identical to King Edward IV. I'm sure that King Henry kind of suspected that maybe this guy really, really was the missing Prince Richard. And so therefore at first he wasn't going to execute him. He just kept him around in the court. This was apparently his wife's brother. And as long as people believed he wasn't King Richard IV, then he had no harm, no foul, right? So he kind of employed him. Well, he tried to escape twice. The first time he was just brought back in and thrown back into the tower. But the second time, let's just say shit got real. There was another prisoner that was held at the tower by the name of Edward Plantagenet. Edward Plantagenet was Elizabeth of York's cousin. He had been thrown in the tower almost immediately as a small child because he also was a threat to King Henry and the seventh. His life is actually very, very, very sad. And some of these people you can definitely see the in humanity that surrounded the tuner dynasty. Although inhumane activities are always surrounding royal families, but literally Edward Plantagenet had been jailed at a very young age. Interestingly enough, King Henry the seventh son, King Henry the eighth would go on to have Edward Plantagenet's sister executed when he was on the throne because any other Plantagenets were always going to be a threat to the tuner dynasty. Now, when his sister Margaret was executed, she was like 60 years old. So it was pretty, pretty sad. But back to Edward. You see this mysterious Perkin Warbeck or Prince Richard recognized Edward Plantagenet as his cousin and they struck up a plan to try to escape in 1499 together. They were going to rise up against Henry the seventh and take back the throne. Well, unfortunately, before they could even try to do this, their plan was stopped. They've been overheard by guards. Edward Plantagenet because he was of royal blood was beheaded. However, the man known as Perkin Warbeck or the mysterious Prince Richard was at this point not considered to be royal blood, even though I think he might have been. So he was to be hanged now because he looked so much like Prince Edward the fourth. They had to beat him up before they killed him so that people watching the hanging would not recognize his face as their late King. He's gone on to carry the name of Perkin Warbeck. Maybe that was also to ensure the safety of any children he might have had with his wife, Lady Catherine Gordon. We don't actually know if they had kids, but if they did have children and he was the missing Prince Richard, then any sons he had would have had a claim to the throne as well. There are other theories surrounding Perkin Warbeck, mostly pointing to that he was who he said he was, the missing Prince Richard. A lot of people believe that the person who killed King Edward the fifth, the 12 year old, his older brother was none other than Henry Tudor's mother Margaret Boford. Margaret Boford was basically batshit crazy. Margaret Boford was obsessed with getting her one and only son, her only child, Henry Tudor on the throne. She claimed that she had had prophetic dreams from God about her son sitting on the throne. Now again, Margaret Boford, they were Lancastrian and a King Edward the fourth was a Yorkist. So this story kind of matches with what Perkin Warbeck told people in Europe. What if Margaret Boford had had his older brother Edward the fifth murdered and his uncle Richard knew about this and with the help of Elizabeth Woodville, his mother, his uncle Richard and his mother got him the young Richard to continental Europe for his own safety. I tend to believe that this is probably what happened. I believe that Perkin Warbeck was the missing Prince Richard. The story about the princes in the tower has so many question marks around it. Now there would be an easy way to determine once and for all if Perkin Warbeck was the missing Prince Richard. And of course that is through DNA analysis. However, I don't know if anybody really knows where Perkin Warbeck is buried because after all he died hanged as a commoner, but we do know where King Edward the fourth is buried and if Perkin Warbeck and Lady Catherine Gordon did have children then maybe that line is still around today and maybe if someone would step forward there could be a DNA analysis done against a descendant of Perkin Warbeck and the remains of King Edward the fourth or Elizabeth Woodville. So what do you guys think? Do you think that the princes in the tower were murdered both of them together when they were very young by their uncle King Richard the third or do you believe that Perkin Warbeck was the real Prince Richard that he had been taken to continental Europe in exile for his own protection. What do you think? I know last week we talked about the two bodies that showed up at the tower that were children's bodies and they're buried at Westminster Abbey carrying the names of the princess now in 1933 again they did pull those bodies up and pretty much thought they were the princess but I know they're trying to get those bodies back up again because that would be another way to either exclude Perkin Warbeck or include him as a possibility if we could just take a DNA sample from the two children that were found at the tower. Let me know your thoughts in the comment section below and next week for Mystery Monday we're going to be jumping over the English Channel into the land of France and we might spend some time examining some of the French royalty and some crazy weird stories that involve them as well. Alright guys thank you so much for sitting through another video again thank you to Josh McKay for doing our music if you would like to purchase our opening song the link is in the description box below and thank you to Todd Roderick for helping me get this video out for you guys I hope you guys are all doing well hanging tight very fun times we're living in I've also got some interviews planned coming up so that will be kind of a change of pace we'll go between storytelling like I do now and also hearing from some other people out there in the world. Alright guys have a wonderful day I'll talk to you soon bye.