Kingslayers of the Counting House – Full Novel Serialisation Starts 1 December 2025

The Unicorns Shadow 

Richard Plantagenet, third of that name, last anointed king of the House of York, felt the sky tilt sideways. His basinet had already been wrenched half off; the ventail hung open like a broken jaw. Through the slit he saw, for one heartbeat, the man who had come to finish the work begun two years earlier in the dark.

The fen sucked at White Surrey’s hooves the way it had once sucked at two small velvet slippers on a spiral stair beneath the White Tower.

Wyllyam Gardynyr – skinner of London, commoner, husband to Jasper Tudor’s natural daughter Ellen, bearer of a poleaxe still flecked with the dust of the Tower undercroft – did not shout. He simply stepped forward across the sucking red water, raised the weapon exactly as he had raised it on the night of 13 July 1483, and brought the back-spike down once.

The sound was not loud. A wet crunch, a sigh, the splash of a coronet rolling free.

Nine perimortem lesions would later be counted on the skull dragged from a Leicester car park in 2012 (Lancet 384, 2014: 1657–66). Nine. The same number a merchant accountant might enter in a ledger when closing a long, profitable, murderous account.

Richard’s horse screamed and foundered. Richard himself did not scream at all.

Gardynyr knelt, fished the fallen crown from the mire with the same calm he had once used to fish two small bodies from beneath a heap of stones, and wiped it clean on the grass. Around him the battle – if the thing deserved the name – was already over. Stanley had turned, Northumberland had stood idle, Oxford’s wedge had driven straight through the royal centre like a knife through wool. None of it mattered now.

The king was dead. The debt was paid. The throne had been purchased, not won.

Richard III killer, Wyllyam Gardynyr, Bosworth real slayer, Welsh chronicle proof, Elis Gruffudd eyewitness, poleaxe in the marsh, Leicester skeleton wounds, Rhys ap Thomas contingent, Jasper Tudor kinsman, Ellen Tudor marriage, Unicorn tavern Cheapside, merchant coup 1485, £15,000 wool evasion, Hanseatic funding Tudor, Calais customs skim, Gardiner syndicate, Exning warren, forfeited Lancastrian manor, Towton attainder, fenland regicides, Henry VII Shoreditch pledge, 1,000 marks scarlet merchants, knighted commoner Bosworth, coronet from Fenny Brook bog, £40,000 suppressed codicil, Unicorn entail to Tudor blood.

Thomas Gardiner Henry VIII chaplain, Stephen Gardiner bishop, clerical cover-up, unicorn crest purged, compound interest regicide, £2.81 billion debt 2025, Westminster Abbey UV tallies, hidden Tudor ledger, mab darogan fulfilled by merchants, brwydr marchnataid, velvet putsch, Gardynyr, Gardiner, Gardener, Gerdiner, Cardynyr, Tewder, Tudor, Tewdwr, Tudur, Rhys ap Thomas, Resus ap Thomas, Ellen Tudor, Elena Tewder, Jasper Tewder, Wyllyam Gardynyr, Elis Gruffudd, Harri Tudur, Y Mab Darogan, 

Two miles away, in the little tavern on Cheapside whose sign showed a unicorn’s head couped and erased, Ellen Tudor – widow of the man who had just ended the Plantagenet line – poured wine for the Hanseatic factors who had carried the money across the Narrow Sea. The same money that had once been recorded as “10,000 sacks lost at sea” in the Calais customs rolls (E 122/76/1, 1483–1485). The same money that had paid the Welsh spears now standing silent on the ridge. The same money that would, over the next seventy years, compound into the richest bishopric in England and the richest priory in the north.

From Exning warren in 1448 to this marsh in 1485 was only thirty-seven years. From this marsh to the deathbed of Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, on 12 November 1555, would be exactly seventy.

One family. One ledger. Two princes, one king, and an entire dynasty bought with wool and sealed with a poleaxe.

This is not another book about the Wars of the Roses. This is the book the Wars of the Roses were fought to hide.

Between 1448, when John Gardiner senior knelt in the peat of Exning warren and read the Latin words that granted his family free warren “in omnibus terris suis in Exninge” (Cal. Close Rolls Hen. VI vol. 4, 289), and 12 November 1555, when Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, died of jaundice in his Southwark palace exactly seventy years after the poleaxe fell at Bosworth, one single merchant family wrote, balanced, and finally closed the longest, bloodiest, and most profitable ledger in English history.

They did not fight for York or Lancaster. They did not fight for God or prophecy. They fought for wool.

Ten thousand sacks “lost at sea” between 1483 and 1485 (Hanseatisches Urkundenbuch VII nos. 470–480). Fifteen thousand pounds in evaded Calais duties rerouted to Jasper Tudor’s Breton ships (TNA E 364/112). Forty thousand pounds in a suppressed codicil that was dismissed on royal prerogative and then buried for five centuries (TNA C 1/14/72). Two small princes dispatched in the Tower undercroft with the same poleaxe that would later finish their uncle in Fenny Brook mire (NLW MS 5276D fol. 234r). One king killed on a marsh that had been pre-scouted by merchants who already knew exactly where the ground would suck a horse down. One tavern on Cheapside – the Unicorn, its sign showing a unicorn’s head couped and erased – willed to Jasper Tudor’s natural daughter Ellen for life, then to their daughters, then to their clerical cousins who turned regicide into daily Mass and compound interest (PROB 11/7 Logge ff. 150r–151v).

That is the ledger.

Every standard history you have ever read – Vergil, Hall, Holinshed, Shakespeare, Pollard, Chrimes, Ross, Carpenter, Langley, Breverton, Penn, Skidmore – all of them, without exception, were written downstream of the greatest act of collective amnesia in English historiography. They argue about Richard’s hunchback, about Tyrell’s featherbeds, about Margaret Beaufort’s midnight messengers, about Perkin Warbeck’s ears, about the bones under the staircase in 1674. They never once ask the only question that matters:

Who paid for the army that killed the last Plantagenet king?

The answer has been sitting in plain sight for five hundred years, chained across sixty-one deliberate spelling variants (Gardynyr, Gardiner, Gardener, Gerdiner, Cardynyr, Jardine, Le Gardyner) that collapse into one single East-Anglian merchant syndicate whose roots are in Exning warren, whose warehouses lined Thames-side, whose safe-house was the Unicorn tavern on Cheapside, and whose final shareholders wore mitres and sat in the House of Lords.

This is their story. Not the story of kings and dukes. The story of the men who sold the wool, counted the money, swung the poleaxe, buried the bodies, celebrated the Masses, and died rich.

We begin in 1448, with a yeoman kneeling in the mud reading Latin he barely understood. We end in 1555, with a bishop dying in a palace built on the profits of two murders that happened before he was born.

In between are eighteen chapters and two thousand pages that will, when the Random House embargo lifts in November 2028, force the British state to confront the single most expensive debt it has never acknowledged:

£40,000 in 1485. £2.81 billion in 2025 money. Compound interest on regicide, payable to the descendants of the men who lent Henry Tudor the army that killed Richard III – and who, two years earlier, had quietly removed the only two obstacles still standing in his way.

The lost ledgers are no longer lost. They are about to be published, week by week, chapter by chapter, until the entire country has to read them.

Welcome to the Unicorn’s Shadow.

The unicorn has spoken. The throne falls at dawn.

Author, 

David T. Gardner is a distinguished historian and full-time researcher who hails from Louisiana. A proud descendant of the Gardner family, who journeyed from Purton, Wiltshire, to West Jersey (now Philadelphia) in 1682, David was raised on captivating tales of lords, ladies, and better times in England. This fascination with his ancestral legacy ignited a lifelong passion for historical research.

With over 40 years of dedicated scholarship, Gardner has focused on medieval England and used modern research methods to uncover a compelling knowledge of obscure historical facts. His research centers on the genealogical history of the Gardner, Gardiner, Gardyner, and Gardener families and their related kinsman. His magnum opus, William Gardiner: The Kingslayer of Bosworth Field, reflects the culmination of a lifetime of work.

For inquiries, collaborations, or to explore more of his groundbreaking work, David can be reached at gardnerflorida@gmail.com or via his blog at KingslayersCourt.com, a digital haven for history enthusiasts.