Hidden women of history: Annie Lock was a bolshie, outspoken Australian missionary, full of contradictions

Missionary Annie Lock with Enbarda (Betsy) left, and Dolly Cumming, both children from the Alice Springs area in Central Australia. Photo taken in Darwin.
National Archives of Australia

Catherine Bishop, Macquarie UniversityAboriginal and Torres Straight Islander readers are advised this story contains images of people who have died.

“We have fared well out of native hands”, wrote missionary Annie Lock from Oodnadatta in South Australia in 1924. Four years later, having moved to Harding Soak north of Alice Springs, she declared the government should “give the natives food in place of their country”.

Lock’s recognition that white Australians had taken Aboriginal land and owed them compensation was ahead of her time, even if her idea of appropriate compensation was inadequate.

Born in 1876 into a Methodist sharefarming family of 14 children in South Australia’s Gilbert Valley, Lock was a practical woman with a very basic education. A dressmaker by trade, in 1903 she joined what would become the United Aborigines Mission.

It operated on faith lines: missionaries were unpaid and could not actively solicit donations, relying on prayer to answer all needs. Lock, like her colleagues, developed a nice line in inviting supporters to “join her in prayer” for very specific needs, such as “a nice staunch horse for £12”, hoping for a “practical” show of sympathy.

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From 1903 to 1937, she lived in 10 mission camps across four states and territories. Renowned for being the “Big Boss”, she usually worked alone establishing “new work” — partly because her colleagues found her intensely uncollegial.

She wasn’t only out of step with many of her contemporaries in her belief Aboriginal Australians deserved compensation: she also believed Aboriginal people had a future and they could be “useful citizens” of Australia.

Once again, however, her view of their place in broader Australian society was narrow. She did not imagine Indigenous doctors, lawyers or politicians, but labourers, stockmen and domestic servants.

I first encountered Annie Lock through some of her letters in the South Australian archives. She berated government officials, demanding action and funding for (what she saw as) Aboriginal people’s interests. She was bolshie and outspoken.

At the time I was a young graduate student and naively thought I had uncovered a feminist heroine. I was quickly disabused: for all her intrepid and gutsy behaviour, Lock held intensely socially conservative views in line with her religious conviction.

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A grand adventure

Lock’s life was like a “girls’ own” adventure story – albeit a teetotal and highly moralistic one.

A story on Annie Lock in the Adelaide Mail, November 1932.

She made epic horse and buggy journeys across the desert, camped in the middle of nowhere with few resources and was shipwrecked in a pearling lugger. She railed against white men’s abuse of Aboriginal women, and she “rode rough-shod over rules and regulations, always managing to come out on top”, in the words of her obituary from her longsuffering mission society.

Many white Australians felt she went too far. She cuddled Aboriginal children, nursed the sick, and shared her campfire – even “drinking tea out of the same cup”.

After the 1928 Coniston Massacre, in which a police party killed over 100 Aboriginal men, women and children in Central Australia, the Board of Enquiry, widely considered as a whitewash at the time, blamed the unrest leading to the events partly on “a woman missionary living among naked blacks, lowering their respect for whites”.

It was no coincidence that Lock was also one of the people who had publicised the massacre, forcing an enquiry in the first place, after Aboriginal people sought refuge in her camp and told her their horrifying tale.

In fact, rather than “lowering their respect” as a white woman living with Aboriginal people, Lock maintained her camp was an area of mutual respect and negotiation:

They told me their laws; […] I made my rules; they kept them; I kept theirs; we had no trouble.

At certain moments when researching her life, I found Lock seemed impressively broadminded. However, given the uneven distribution of power, the reality was not so idyllic.

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A troublesome woman

Lock was an integral part of the colonial machine, with all its patronising ethnocentricity. As a white woman, Lock was never troubled by any sense that Aboriginal people were her equals.

She could be dictatorial and bloody-minded, with a highly developed sense of what she saw as right and wrong, approving harsh punishment for transgressors. At the Coniston enquiry itself she was critical of those Aboriginal men who killed cattle, suggesting “a good flogging” was called for.

In Western Australia, she actively took children from their families and she was instrumental in establishing Carrolup Native Settlement in 1915 — a forerunner of notorious Moore River Settlement — to which Aboriginal people were removed.

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In South Australia in 1924, she started what became Colebrook Home, in which Aboriginal children of mixed descent were institutionalised.

At Ooldea, when Lock was 58, the overworked and tired missionary let her guard slip. An Aboriginal man hit her after she punished his daughter. The daughter should be sent to Colebrook, she suggested, “to punish” him — deviating from the usual missionary script of “in the child’s best interests”.

Group of children at the first mission house at Oodnadatta, 1925.
State Library of South Australia

But history is complicated. One elderly Aboriginal woman smiled when she told an interviewer her memories of Lock, “a real fat one”, playing rounders at Ooldea. The image of a stout middle-aged missionary hitching up her skirts and charging around the sandhills with a bunch of Aboriginal kids is hard to beat.

In Central Australia, some remembered her as a caring for children “on country”, saving them from being sent away.

Lock was consistently vocal about Aboriginal girls’ rights to be protected from white men (although she condoned Aboriginal men’s violent “punishment” of their wives). And while she was irrepressibly evangelistic, she eventually learned Christianity could work with some aspects of Aboriginal culture. Sometimes, she wrote, Aboriginal people could “teach white people a lesson”. They were “real socialist”, sharing the clothes that she gave them. She waxed lyrical about their “corroboree songs” and appreciated the authority of elder generations over the younger.

In 1937, aged 60 and after 35 years in the mission field, Lock suddenly retired. Certainly she had been finding her “pioneering” missionary work more of a strain, and her health had suffered, but also, she told her supporters, God was giving her a “quieter work”. Much to everyone’s amazement, this independent woman had found herself a husband.

She married a retired bank manager and spent the last six years of her life evangelising in a caravan around Eyre Peninsula.

Lock surprised many by retiring and marrying in her 60s.
United Aborigines Mission

Contradictions

In uncovering the life of Annie Lock, I found a woman who was both fascinating and discomfiting. We can try and judge her motivations and actions as an individual of her time, but we cannot ignore her impact.

She saved people’s lives by providing food and healthcare, and a refuge from more hostile forces. She also destroyed families by removing children. She introduced Christianity, which some found a welcome way of navigating the changing world. She was one of an army of “do-gooders” whose haphazard attempts to improve the lives of Aboriginal people did not always have the result that anyone would have desired.

Her personal impact could be positive – some remember her as “lovely” and “motherly”. But her impact as an active participant in “protectionist” government policies, which limited Aboriginal people’s lives and movement and tore families apart, was traumatic and has endured.

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Catherine Bishop is the author of Too Much Cabbage and Jesus Christ: Australia’s “Mission Girl” Annie Lock, out now with Wakefield Press

Catherine Bishop, Postdoctoral Fellow, Macquarie University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

People dropped whisky into their noses to treat Spanish flu. Here’s what else they took that would raise eyebrows today

Shutterstock

Philippa Martyr, The University of Western AustraliaWe’re researching COVID-19 in a fast-paced world with new data becoming available all the time. We track which interventions work well and which ones don’t.

But in 1918, during the Spanish flu pandemic, the world was a different place. No one was entirely sure what caused influenza. By the time health authorities began to find out, it was too late.

Our knowledge about viruses was limited in 1918, but we knew about bacteria. People who died of flu had bacterial infection in their lungs. However, this threw researchers off track because these were secondary infections, not caused directly by the flu.

With this lack of knowledge, it was still an anything-goes medical research world. There were unregulated vaccine trials and lots of hype for the latest “cure”, even in respectable medical journals.

More than 100 years on, controversial “cures” for COVID-19, such as ivermectin, are making the headlines, being reported in medical journals and are being promoted by doctors and politicians.

Here’s what we know about the Spanish flu “cures” of the day, whisky included.

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Doctors, pharmacists and nurses had cures

Doctors developed and used some of these cures for the flu. Sydney’s chief quarantine officer, Dr Reid, treated patients in March 1919 with 15-grain (1 gram) doses of calcium lactate every four hours, and a “vaccine” containing influenza and pneumococcus bacteria. In 203 cases, he had no deaths.

Calcium lactate is used today to treat low levels of calcium in the blood. But Dr Reid’s doses are well above the current recommended daily level.

J R A McAlister’s treatment ‘cures influenza at once’.
Trove Digitised Newspapers, Guyra Argus, September 11, 1919, p2, National Library of Australia

Chemists were also busy making and selling their own influenza cures. J. Reginald Albert McAlister of Guyra in regional New South Wales advertised his 1919 patented mixture as curing influenza at once.

People even listened to nurses — who at the time were usually the least important people in the health-care system — about cures for the Spanish flu.

Nan Taylor, a New Zealand nurse, advocated whisky — lots of it, including gargling and drops up the nose. She also recommended quinine and castor oil.

Nurse Kate Guazzini cared for Spanish flu patients in South Africa in late 1918, and caught the flu there before moving to Sydney. She said:

I was kept alive on brandy and milk for six weeks […] That, with quinine and hot lemon drinks, were found to be the only effective remedies.

Food manufacturers linked themselves to flu cures. In 1919 a brand new beef extract, Bonox, had just hit the Australian market, and the flu epidemic was a great marketing opportunity. Bonox was advertised as a sure way to recover your health and strength after the flu.

This Bonox advertisement promised a robust recovery.
Trove Digitised Newspapers, Herald (Melbourne), April 26, 1919, p9, National Library of Australia

News of ‘cures’ spread far and wide

In much of Australia just after WWI there were often no doctors close by. So many people were used to dosing themselves with homemade potions and remedies. They shared their prescriptions in the pages of local newspapers.

Between 1918 and 1920, Australian newspapers were flooded with Spanish flu cures of all kinds.

In October 1918, a journalist at Victoria’s Bendigo Independent lamented:

Cures? My goodness me, the vast amount of cures on the market are positively frightening, and everyone has a favorite cure. I pin my faith to one, you to another. There’s a certain influenza mixture that, taken in the early stages, is regarded as a certain cure by one large section […] Asperin [sic] is the cry of another batch of victims, and they tell you that that drug does the trick. ‘Try whiskey and milk taken hot and taken often,’ is the advice of others who have had it. But one and all end in the same way: ‘Go to bed and stay there till the thing leaves you.’

Aspro advertising, Telegraph (Qld), 30 July 1921, page 14.
Trove Digitised Newspapers, National Library of Australia

Aspirin was very popular as a Spanish flu treatment worldwide. But people sometimes took it at dangerously high doses, which may have boosted the number of deaths attributed to the flu.

In the absence of many other treatments, government authorities promoted aspirin, along with quinine and phenacetin.

The pain killer phenacetin is now banned because it’s linked to kidney and urinary tract cancers.

Like aspirin, its overuse might have boosted the Spanish flu death rate.

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They’re using it in America

Like today, Australians were also eagerly reading about overseas experiments, and wanting to try these cures locally.

In June 1919, the Richmond River Herald reported:

On Friday we published the following New York cable: — ‘Dr. Charles Duncan, at the Convention of the American Medical Association, said the cure for influenza was one drachm of infected mucus pasteurised and with filtered water injected subcutaneously … Yesterday (says Tuesday’s Tweed ‘Daily’) a youth was seen inquiring for a chemist, having in his hand the above clipping and sixpence, his object being to secure that amount’s worth of the ‘cure.’ Several others, it is understood, have also been inquiring into the same matter, with a view to ‘having it made up’ locally.

Some of these cures lingered

Once the Spanish flu pandemic was over, many of the cures remained. Most of them, like aspirin, incorporated the threat of influenza into regular advertising.

Some, like quinine, have made a reappearance during the COVID-19 pandemic.

And one of the most commonly recommended cures — whisky taken at frequent intervals — hasn’t lost its popularity.

Philippa Martyr, Lecturer, Pharmacology, Women’s Health, School of Biomedical Sciences, The University of Western Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Taliban’s rule threatens what’s left of Afghanistan’s dazzlingly diverse cultural history

The Tailban destroyed this Buddha statue dating to the 6th century AD in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, in March 2001. The photo on the left was taken in 1977.
AP Photo/Etsuro Kondo, (left photo) and Osamu Semba, both Asahi

Julian Droogan, Macquarie University and Malcolm Choat, Macquarie UniversityDespite cliched talk of a “graveyard of empires”, what we now call Afghanistan has for thousands of years been an important part of many sophisticated cultures.

Situated along the Silk Road — a tangle of Eurasian trade routes stretching back to the days of the Roman Empire — Afghanistan and its people have long served as a place of connection between Mediterranean, Persian, Indian and Chinese civilisations.

It has been home to Hellenistic cities populated by the successors of Alexander the Great, glittering Buddhist monasteries that served to transmit early Buddhism from India to far away China and Japan, and a series of Medieval Islamic kingdoms at the forefront of the literature and science of their day.

This dazzlingly diverse heritage is preserved in over 2,600 archaeological sites scattered across its rugged terrain, numerous regional museums and galleries, and, most famously, the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul. Refurbished in 2007, the museum holds a collection of over 80,000 artefacts from throughout the region.

All of this is now under renewed threat by Taliban forces, whose fanatical interpretation of Islam forbids representative imagery, and is particularly dismissive of anything it considers to be non-Islamic.

While remaining focused on the plight of the Afghan people, countries such as the US, UK, and Australia need to also start planning how they can reduce the coming assault on Afghanistan’s art, history and material culture.

A history of destruction

Afghanistan’s archaeological sites were previously systematically looted and destroyed during the period of Soviet occupation and warlordism that followed.

In the 1980s, whole ancient sites were illegally excavated with artifacts sold off under cover of war. The Hellenistic Greek city of Ai-Khanoum, dating from the 4th century BCE to the mid-2nd century CE and discovered in the 1830s, was destroyed, including its Greek theatre, gymnasium and temple to Zeus.

This plate, dating from the 3rd century BCE, depicts the Greek gods Cybele and Nike. It was found in Ai-Khanoum, an ancient city in what is modern-day Takhar Province in Afghanistan.
National Museum of Afghanistan, Kabul

During Afghanistan’s civil war in the early 1990s, items from the 12th century palace of Mas’ud III were looted and distributed through international black markets.

The National Museum in Kabul, established in 1919, was extensively damaged and looted in the period immediately following the end of communist rule in 1992.

The “Dead Seas Scrolls of Buddhism” — thousands of scrolls and fragments written on leaves, bark, parchment and copper containing Buddhist sermons and treatises from as early as the 2nd century AD — were smuggled out of Afghanistan and dispersed among various manuscript collections from 1994 to 2001. Some were looted from the Kabul museum, but most were found in caves in the region of Bamiyan in the 1990s.

From 1996 to 2001, the Taliban outlawed almost all forms of art while systematically looting and destroying libraries and museums, and persecuting anyone considered to be an expert or academic.

A museum employee stands in front of a destroyed statue in the basement of the Kabul Museum in Kabul, Afghanistan in 2001.
AP Photo/Marco Di Lauro

The Taliban were ruthless in their destruction, but also strategic. They saw Afghanistan’s pre-Islamic art and culture as a resource to be used and abused where possible to aid their international objectives.

Most infamously, during their final year in power they glorified in the demolition of the 6th century Bamiyan Buddhas while also decimating the already weakened collections of the National Museum.

Just two years earlier, in 1999, the Taliban Minister of Culture had assured the international community Afghanistan’s Buddhist heritage would be safe under his custodianship. In 2001, the Bayiman Buddhas were held hostage — and ultimately destroyed — while the Taliban demanded international recognition.

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What does this mean for Afghanistan today?

The Taliban are again claiming Afghanistan’s heritage will be safe under their rule.

Statements have been released instructing fighters to protect and preserve historical sites, halt the plundering of archaeological digs, and forbid the selling of antiquities on the black market. Guards have been posted at the National Museum to prevent looting.

However, this initial charm offensive could just be the opening move in a longer strategy in which Afghanistan’s history and heritage will be once again held hostage. Priceless cultural treasures may be threatened with destruction.

Archaeologists and curators responsible for preserving Afghanistan’s national heritage were caught off-guard by the Taliban’s rapid advance. Many are now seeking to flee the country or are going into hiding.

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The loss of these experts and custodians of Afghanistan’s rich heritage will mean there is nobody to protect its material past from neglect or looting. Nor will future generations of young Afghans be able to learn about their past from fellow citizens who have dedicated their lives to preserving it.

Australia’s part to play in stopping illegal trade

Looted antiquities make up a lucrative international black market. There is a proven connection between these back markets and international terrorist groups such as the Islamic State.

A 1st century Clasp from the collection of the National Museum of Kabul.
(AAP Image/National Museum of Afghanistan, Thierry Ollivier

As has been seen in Iraq and Syria, the looting and sale of the archaeological heritage of Afghanistan could be used to fund international terrorism.

Markets for illegally looted artefacts only exist while international collectors — including museums and galleries — continue to acquire stolen antiquities.

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Illegal trade in antiquities: a scourge that has gone on for millennia too long

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Afghanistan remains, first and foremost, a humanitarian tragedy and we must do what we can to assist the Afghan people.

But now is also the time for Australia and other liberal democracies to put in place stronger legal safeguards to prevent the trafficking of antiquities, in particular much stronger border security and customs measures for the detection and ending of this illicit trade.

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A brief history of the Taliban by an Afghan scholar who lived through it.

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Julian Droogan, Senior Lecturer, Macquarie University and Malcolm Choat, Professor of History, Macquarie University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

New research shows WA’s first governor condoned killing of Noongar people despite proclaiming all equal under law

Portrait of Sir James Stirling, ca. 1833.
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales ML 15 Ref: 897230’

Jeremy Martens, The University of Western AustraliaIn June, councillors in Perth’s City of Stirling decided not to change the name of their municipality, despite former Western Australian governor James Stirling’s leading role in the 1834 Pinjarra massacre.

That massacre, in which troops and colonists killed between 15 and 80 Noongar people, is widely known. Less recognised is Stirling’s encouragement of soldiers and settlers to flout the law and employ violence, including murder, against Noongar communities resisting colonial dispossession elsewhere in WA.

Stirling was WA’s first governor from 1829-39. My new research on the early history of pastoralism highlights how this industry’s success was built on the violent conquest of the Avon valley in the 1830s, during which Stirling condoned the unlawful killing of Noongar people by soldiers and settlers.

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In one case, for instance, he refused to prosecute a farm worker who killed an Indigenous man in cold blood.

This was despite his proclamation that all the settlement’s inhabitants, Indigenous and European, would be protected equally by British law.

He also argued authorities needed to deliver a decisive blow to “tranquilize” the district. Any balanced assessment of his career in WA should take these actions into account.

‘Liable to be prosecuted’

The proclamation declaring the establishment of Swan River in June 1829 explicitly extended the British legal system to the new settlement.

Indeed Stirling gave notice that if any person was “convicted of behaving in a fraudilent [sic], cruel or felonious Manner towards the Aboriginees of the Country” they would be “liable to be prosecuted and tried for the Offence, as if the same had been committed against any other of His Majesty’s Subjects”.

Yet his commitment to abide by the laws he had proclaimed was frequently tested, especially when colonists began to explore and occupy the Avon valley, 60 miles east of Perth. This area became the centre of the colony’s nascent pastoral industry.

Map of WA from the 1830s.
Author provided

The conquest and settlement of the Avon district by pastoralists and farmers in the 1830s was especially bloody. The Noongar people of the Ballardong region, who owned this well-watered and fertile country, bravely resisted the settler incursion.

In 1836, Stirling dispatched ten soldiers to the town of York under the command of Lieutenant Henry Bunbury. This young officer (for whom the city of Bunbury south of Perth is named) was instructed by the governor “to take the most decisive measures”. Bunbury took this to mean he had been “ordered over here with a detachment to make war upon the Natives”.

A portrait of Bunbury.
Author provided

During 1836 and 1837, Bunbury committed several atrocities, freely admitted to in letters and journals. People sleeping at night were killed without warning. A Noongar man running away from his mounted party was killed, also at night.

Bunbury knew his actions were illegal, but claimed in a letter to Stirling that “severe measures” were necessary. Stirling expressed his satisfaction with Bunbury’s “promptitude”.

In a public notice he explained “a decisive blow” at York was necessary “to tranquilize that District”.

The “boldness” of the Ballardong Noongar resistance meant that nothing would suffice, wrote Stirling, except

an early exhibition of force, or […] such acts of decisive severity, as will appal them as a people for a time, and reduce their tribe to weakness.

Settler killings

Stirling actively condoned the killing of Noongar people by Avon settlers. One particularly egregious atrocity occurred in September 1836 when the pioneering pastoralist Arthur Trimmer ordered a worker to murder a Noongar man “in cool blood”.

The employee, Edward Gallop, was instructed to hide in a barn loft with a gun. The doors of the barn, which contained flour, were intentionally left open and as soon as three men entered to take some, Gallop shot one of them in the head.

Stirling made no public statement condemning this premeditated murder. In a letter to his bosses at the Colonial Office in London, he openly defended settlers’ use of extrajudicial violence.

While expressing his “displeasure and regret at the loss of the Native’s life”, Stirling decided not to prosecute Gallop. He believed that

in cases where the law is necessarily ineffectual for the protection of life and property the right of self protection cannot with justice be circumscribed within very narrow limits.

On several other occasions colonists murdered Noongar people without cause, and in some cases mutilated their bodies. For example, another of Trimmer’s employees named Souper boasted of shooting a woman while hunting in the forest; soldiers under Bunbury’s command later mutilated her body.

When Stirling was asked to investigate and prosecute these crimes by the missionary Louis Giustiniani, he ignored them.

The perpetrators never faced justice.

Jeremy Martens, Senior Lecturer, History, The University of Western Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Health Break Time Out

Hi all. Once again I have been encountering a noticeable decline in my health, so will be taking a ‘preventative break’ over the next week or so. There will be no posts until Saturday the 25th of September 2021 or thereabouts.

Today in History: September 13

Today in History: September 12

Today in History: September 11

20 Years Since 9/11

Princes in the Tower: how I established a direct link between Richard III and the two murders

Public Domain/Shutterstock

Tim Thornton, University of HuddersfieldIt is perhaps one of the greatest murder mystery stories in British history – a young king and his brother simply vanish. The boys, now dubbed “the Princes in the Tower”, were held in the Tower of London in 1483, but disappeared from public view, never to be seen again.

Richard III has long been held responsible for the murder of his nephews in a dispute about succession to the throne. But Richard’s defenders have pointed to a lack of hard evidence to connect the king to the disappearance of the princes – who were aged just 12 and nine when Richard took the throne in June 1483.

But I believe my recent research provides the most powerful evidence yet as to who the boys’ murderers were. And it connects the murderers directly to Richard III.

The princes

Painting of the two princes, Edward and Richard, in the Tower, 1483 by Sir John Everett Millais.
John Everett Millais, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The first detailed account linking the deaths of the princes to Richard can be found in the History of King Richard III by Sir Thomas More, a public servant who from 1518 served on Henry VIII’s Privy Council and later became Lord Chancellor (Henry succeeded to the throne in 1509, after his father defeated Richard III in 1485). In his book, written about 30 years later, More names two men, Miles Forest and John Dighton, as the murderers. And says they were recruited by Sir James Tyrell, a servant of Richard III at his orders.

More claims that Richard felt he wouldn’t be fully accepted as king while the boys were still alive so he made a plan to get rid of them. He ordered the Constable of the Tower to give Tyrell the keys to the Tower for one night. Tyrell planned to murder the boys in their beds and chose Forest, one of their servants, and Dighton, who looked after his horses, to do the deed. All the other servants were ordered to leave so the murder could be carried out. Then Tyrell ordered the men to bury the boys at the foot of some stairs, deep in the ground.

Thomas More wrote his History of King Richard III between around 1513 and 1518.
British Library

Written over 30 years after the events, it is easy for Richard’s supporters to dismiss More’s version of events. Indeed, many people have questioned this story, seeing it as “Tudor propaganda”, designed to blacken the name of a dead king. It has even been suggested that the names of the alleged murderers were made up by More.

But I’ve discovered that the names More gives for the men who are alleged to have killed the princes (Forest and Dighton) are not imaginary, but real people.

Finding the clues

By the middle of the 1510s when More was working on his book, Edward Forest, son of suspect Miles Forest was a servant of Henry VIII’s chamber, and Miles, his brother, was employed by top adviser Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. In this way, the sons were living and working alongside More – meaning he would have been able to speak with them directly.

Both brothers were also the recipients of royal grants and leases of royal lands and offices. This shows how favoured they were by Henry VIII and builds on evidence I have discovered to suggest the brothers were at the heart of the Tudor regime.

Portrait of Richard III of England, painted c.1520.
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I’ve also discovered that when More was composing his other great work, Utopia, in 1515 – and very likely thinking through the History of King Richard III – Miles Forest junior was a messenger between Henry VIII’s court in England and the embassy on which More served. This connects More’s world very directly to the story he is telling, and to the man he says is the leading murderer of the princes in the Tower.

This is a story that is not going away anytime soon. Indeed, the recent announcement of a new film about the rediscovery of Richard III, written by Steve Coogan and Stephen Frears, shows that interest in the controversial monarch is as strong as ever.

And while my latest evidence does not prove definitively that Richard III murdered his nephews, it is certainly clear proof that More wrote his history when he was in direct contact with the men who were closely associated with this most notorious of crimes.

Tim Thornton, Professor of History and Deputy Vice-Chancellor, University of Huddersfield

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.