Miles Forrest, Regicide, and his Legacy in Teesdale and Barnard Castle

Sir Thomas More named two men as murderers of King Edward V and his brother, Richard, duke of York, the ‘princes in the Tower’. One of them, Miles Forrest, held office at Barnard Castle under King Richard III. This article explores the implications for Teesdale and for the Forrest family of this association with such notorious alleged murders. It establishes that, in spite of the wide currency of More’s account, any association between Forrest, the murders and Barnard Castle was rapidly lost. This tendency was reinforced when scholars in the nineteenth century confused Barnard Castle with Baynard’s Castle, a palace in London. The article identifies that the association was revived in the early twentieth century by an artist and entrepreneur, Victor Mazzini Walton, at a property known as Blagraves, and boosted by the heightened interest in the princes’ fate associated with the examination of their alleged remains in Westminster Abbey in 1933. More recently, scepticism about Walton’s claims and more generally about Richard III’s guilt has resulted in less prominence being given to the story, but it remains current in Teesdale, an indicator of the power of invented tradition and of the story of Richard III and his nephews.