Lucy Worsley Investigates

So James Tyrell devised that they should be murdered in their beds. Maybe new clues will come to light but until then, I think the key to this mystery is to interrogate the sources we have. To the execution whereof he appointed Miles Forrest, to him he joined one John Dighton. Thomas More's account includes such specific detail about the night of the princes' murder. I want to know where he got his facts from and if they could be true. So this is Buckfast Abbey, it's my first visit. Hello, can I go on in? Thank you. I'm here to find out about some game changing new research into Thomas More's text, but first I want to see an extraordinary religious relic. Thomas More was a devout Catholic, Henry VIII had him executed for opposing his plan to reform the Church. May I come in. - You may indeed And as an act of religious devotion he often wore, concealed beneath his clothes a painfully coarse goat hair shirt. Is this really it? - This is really it. I just feel a huge inbuilt scepticism about the exact nature, not just of holy relics, but of all you know secular relics, anything that is said to be the hat of Henry VIII the hat of Cardinal Wolsey. This is the most remarkable object because it's highly possibly, in fact it's certain in your eyes that that touched the skin of a man who was alive five hundred years' ago. What happened was he was um, beheaded on the 6th of July 1535, and the day before he gave this hair shirt to his adopted daughter, Margaret Giggs and it then passed to the Diocese of Plymouth, the Diocese of Plymouth then asked us to, to, have it here for public veneration. These are all verifiable historical events and that makes it a very significant relic I think. What sort of a person, does this hair shirt say that he was then? This is something that he chose to wear. Because he identified with Christ and Christ suffered on the cross. Wearing this every day is a very close connection with the sufferings of Christ. That's a really different world view isn't it? A lot of people would say that Thomas More's book about the rise of Richard III is pro Tudor propaganda. I suppose if he's someone as committed to his faith as to do something like this on a regular basis, he's not going to be bullied by worldly authority in any way is he? I think the fact that he would not go along with Henry VIII um, becoming the head of the church in this country would certainly indicate that he was willing to put his life on the line. I think that's a massive argument against him having been purely a propagandist. Yes, I, I, think, I think his character, his life, his writings all indicate that he was interested in what is fair, what is just.