What Happened to the Princes in the Tower?

Vol. I · Entry 21 · Deaths Without Explanation

Edward V and his brother Richard, Duke of York, were lodged in the Tower of London in the summer of 1483 and were never reliably seen again. There is no contemporary record of their deaths. The likeliest explanation remains that they were killed on the orders of their uncle, Richard III, but no charge was ever laid, no bodies were identified, and the case has never been closed by evidence.

The strangest thing in this file is not that two children vanished. It is that nobody ever said they were killed.

What is actually documented

Edward IV died in April 1483. His twelve-year-old son was proclaimed Edward V. The boy's uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, took custody of him on the road to London and was named Protector.

In June, Edward's nine-year-old brother was removed from sanctuary at Westminster and joined him in the royal apartments at the Tower — at that date a residence as much as a prison, and the normal place for a king to lodge before a coronation.

That same month, the boys were declared illegitimate on the grounds that their father's marriage had been invalid. Gloucester was crowned Richard III on 6 July.

Through that summer the boys were seen at the Tower with decreasing frequency. The Italian cleric Dominic Mancini, in London until shortly after the coronation, recorded that they were withdrawn to the inner apartments and that men were seen weeping at the mention of Edward, who it was suspected had been done away with. That is the closest thing to a contemporary statement anyone has.

After the autumn of 1483, nothing.

The silence is the evidence

Fifteenth-century England documented itself thoroughly. Deaths of royal children produced records: a coroner's finding, a funeral, an announcement, an entry in an account roll for candles and cloth.

For these two there is no coroner's record, no confession taken at the time, no proclamation, no funeral, no accusation from the throne, and no charge in any Parliament. Richard III never announced their deaths, which a king who wished to end the threat of a restoration might have been expected to do. Nor did he produce them alive, which would have answered the rumours instantly and cost him nothing if they were.

Henry VII, who took the crown in 1485 and had every political reason to charge his predecessor with murdering children, did not do so in those terms either. The 1485 act of attainder against Richard accuses him of shedding infants' blood in general language and names no victim and no occasion.

The accounts we have, and when they were written

The detailed version most people know — Sir James Tyrrell commissioning two men, the boys smothered in their beds, the bodies buried at the foot of a stair — comes from Thomas More's History of King Richard III, written around 1513 to 1518. More was five years old in 1483. He was writing thirty years later, under the dynasty that had replaced Richard, and his own manuscript was left unfinished and unpublished in his lifetime.

Polydore Vergil, writing for Henry VII, and the later chronicles of Hall and Holinshed, build on the same foundation. Shakespeare builds on them. The picture is vivid and it is Tudor.

This does not make it false. More had access to people who had been adults in 1483. It makes it testimony recorded a generation later by an interested party, which is a category of evidence, not a verdict.

The bones

In 1674, workmen demolishing a staircase in the White Tower found a wooden chest containing the bones of two children. Charles II accepted the identification and had them interred in Westminster Abbey.

They were examined once, in 1933, by an anatomist and a dental surgeon who concluded the ages were roughly consistent with the princes. By modern standards that examination is not usable: the sex could not be determined by the methods of the day, the date could not be established, and the remains had been disturbed and were incompletely recovered.

The Abbey and the Crown have consistently declined applications to re-examine them. Until that changes, the only physical candidates in the case are untested.

Where the record goes silent

No date of death. Not a month, not a season, not a year that anyone can support from a document.

No identified remains. The 1674 bones may be the princes, two other children, or older burials entirely. Nothing rules any of it in or out.

No charge. Two kings in succession had reason to name a killer and neither did, which is the fact every theory has to accommodate and none explains well.

Two children in state custody stopped being seen, and a kingdom that recorded everything recorded nothing. Everything after that is inference — some of it good, none of it a finding.

Sources

• Mancini, D., De Occupatione Regni Anglie per Riccardum Tercium, composed late 1483.
• The Crowland Chronicle continuations, second continuation, 1486.
• More, T., The History of King Richard III, composed c. 1513–1518, unfinished.
• Act of attainder against Richard III, Parliament of 1485.
• Tanner, L. E. and Wright, W., report on the examination of the Westminster Abbey urn remains, 1933.