By 1483, the Wars of the Roses had been raging for almost thirty years. The conflict pitted two rival branches of England’s royal House of Plantagenet against one another: the House of Lancaster, represented by the Red Rose, and the House of York, represented by the White Rose. Both claimed to be the rightful heirs of King Edward III, whose many children had left competing branches of the family with strong claims to the throne. What began as a struggle between ambitious noble families would ultimately become one of the bloodiest succession crises in English history. The first major clash came in 1455 at the First Battle of St Albans. Richard, Duke of York, believed that King Henry VI’s repeated bouts of mental illness had left the kingdom vulnerable to misgovernment by powerful favourites, particularly Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset. Initially, Richard did not seek the crown for himself. Instead, he argued that he should govern England as Lord Protector until the King recovered. However, as relations between the rival factions deteriorated and compromise became increasingly impossible, Richard eventually advanced his own dynastic claim to the throne. The struggle soon escalated into open civil war.
Richard was killed at the Battle of Wakefield in 1460, but his claim did not die with him. Instead, it passed to his eldest son, Edward, who proved to be one of England’s greatest military commanders. In 1461, after a string of Yorkist victories culminating in the Battle of Towton, Edward seized the throne as King Edward IV. Although his reign gradually brought stability to much of England, it was not without controversy. In 1464, Edward secretly married Elizabeth Woodville, a widow from a relatively modest gentry family whose relatives had previously supported the Lancastrian cause. Many of the kingdom’s leading nobles, including Edward’s powerful ally Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, were outraged. The Woodville family rapidly accumulated titles, wealth and influential marriages, creating bitter resentment among many of the older aristocracy.
The political turmoil reached its height in 1470 when Warwick and Edward’s own brother, George, Duke of Clarence, rebelled against the King. Edward was forced to flee England, allowing the imprisoned Henry VI to briefly reclaim the throne. The restoration lasted less than a year. Edward returned with an army in 1471, defeated Warwick at the Battle of Barnet and crushed the remaining Lancastrian resistance at the Battle of Tewkesbury, where Henry VI’s only son, Edward of Westminster, was killed. Days later, Henry himself died in the Tower of London, almost certainly murdered on Edward’s orders, although no definitive proof has ever emerged. For the next twelve years, Edward IV ruled England largely in peace. That stability was shattered on April 9th 1483 when Edward IV unexpectedly died at just 40 years old. His eldest son, the 12-year-old Edward V, immediately became King. Knowing that his heir was still a child, Edward IV had appointed his younger brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, to serve as Lord Protector until the young king came of age. Although Edward V was legally king from the moment of his father’s death, Richard was entrusted with governing the kingdom during his nephew’s minority.
Almost immediately, however, a struggle for power erupted within the Yorkist court. Elizabeth Woodville feared that Richard would dominate the government and quickly attempted to establish a Regency Council centred around herself and her relatives before Richard could assume control as Protector. The Woodvilles had become deeply unpopular among much of the nobility, who viewed them as ambitious outsiders who had gained their influence through royal favour rather than birth. Richard, meanwhile, was governing northern England from Middleham Castle in Yorkshire when news of his brother’s death reached him. Travelling south to meet the young king, he intercepted Edward V and his entourage at Stony Stratford. There he arrested several leading Woodville supporters, including the King’s maternal uncle, Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, and his half-brother, Richard Grey. Although initially imprisoned, both men would later be executed on Richard’s orders. Richard then escorted his nephew to the Tower of London, the traditional royal residence where English monarchs stayed while preparing for their coronation. At this stage, there was little reason for contemporaries to view the move as suspicious.
Elizabeth Woodville, fearing for the safety of her younger children, fled with them to sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. Richard soon persuaded her to allow her youngest son, Richard, Duke of York, to leave sanctuary and join his brother in the Tower, assuring her that both boys would be treated honourably before Edward’s forthcoming coronation. Then, in June 1483, everything changed. A clergyman named Robert Stillington claimed that years earlier Edward IV had secretly entered into a legally binding marriage contract with Lady Eleanor Butler before marrying Elizabeth Woodville. Under medieval canon law, if the allegation were true, Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth would have been invalid, making all of their children illegitimate. Parliament accepted this argument in an act later known as Titulus Regius. If Edward V and his siblings had no legal claim to the throne, then the crown instead passed to Edward IV’s younger brother.
On June 26th 1483, Richard accepted the throne as King Richard III. The coronation of Edward V was cancelled. The two young princes remained inside the Tower of London. Dominic Mancini, a minor Italian diplomat, chronicled the time of the princes extensively. He wrote that they were often secluded to their rooms before he saw them less and less before they disappeared all together. At some point during their stay, Mancini wrote, that they were moved inside the White Tower, the location of Royal prisoners rather than the typical Royal living grounds. Mancini later reported that Edward V had become deeply withdrawn. According to the physician who attended him, the young king spent much of his time in prayer and confession, “like a victim prepared for sacrifice, sought remission of his sins by daily confession and penance, because he believed that death was facing him” The Great Chronicle of London later reported that the boys “were seen shooting [arrows] and playing in the garden of the Tower” on June 16th, 1483. This was the last time the boys were ever reported alive. By July 6th, Richard III was crowned as King. One day the boys were there and the next they were not. Some time in the summer of 1483, the boys hastily vanished and were never seen again. But who? And how?
Suspect #1: Richard III
Richard III, the boys’ uncle, has long been regarded as the prime suspect. As king, Richard controlled the Tower of London, its garrison and everyone who had access to the princes. If they were murdered while confined there, it would have been extremely difficult for such an act to occur without either his knowledge or his approval. Throughout his seizure of power in 1483, Richard had already imprisoned and executed several political rivals in order to secure his place on the throne. Although the princes had been eliminated from the succession, Richard’s hold on the monarchy was very insecure due to the way in which he had attained the crown, leading to a backlash against him by the Yorkist establishment. An attempt had already been made to rescue them and restore Edward V to the throne, clear evidence that the existence of the princes would remain a threat as long as they were alive. The boys could have been used by Richard’s enemies as figureheads for rebellion. Rumours of their death were in circulation by late 1483, but Richard never attempted to prove that they were alive by having them seen in public, which strongly suggests that they were dead by then. Richard also failed to open any investigation into his nephews’ disappearance, which would have been in his interest if he was innocent. Whether he killed the boys or not is up to interpretation but he is, by far, the prime suspect in their vanishing.
However, Richard was absent from London for much of the period during which the princes disappeared. However, as king he did not need to be physically present to order their deaths. Some have presented Sir James Tyrrell as the one to get his hands dirty. Shortly before his execution in May 1502, he reportedly confessed, under torture, to murdering the two boys at the behest of Richard III, although the confession itself has never survived. Famed playwright William Shakespeare portrayed Tyrell as the actual culprit acting on Richard’s orders in his historical tragedy, ‘Richard III,’ largely based off this alleged confession. Tyrell’s culpability is supported as historians note that he had a rapid rise to positions of power throughout Richard’s rule. Richard’s guilt in the matter, directly or not, was widely accepted by contemporaries, including Elizabeth, who would go on to support Henry Tudor in his campaign against Richard III. One possible motive for Elizabeth Woodville subsequently making her peace with Richard III, and bringing her daughters out of sanctuary, could be that Richard had to swear a solemn oath, before witnesses, to protect and provide for her surviving children, which made it much less likely they could be quietly murdered as it was believed their brothers had been.
However, much of his image was shaped post-mortem. After his slaying at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, Henry Tudor claimed the throne and united both houses of Lancaster and York under the now infamous Tudor dynasty as King Henry VII. Henry VII oversaw an act of Parliament that accused Richard of “the unnatural, mischievous and great perjuries, treasons, homicides and murders, in shedding of infant’s blood, with many other wrongs, odious offences and abominations against God and man,” with the “shedding of infant’s blood” possibly being a reference to the disappearance of the princes. Decades later, Sir Thomas More, Lord High Chancellor under the infamous King Henry VIII, wrote a highly influential history of Richard III in which he described Richard as “physically deformed, an outward manifestation of his villainous ways.” Although More had been only a child when the princes disappeared, his account became one of the principal sources for later Tudor historians and, eventually, William Shakespeare. Shakespeare cemented this image in the public imagination, portraying Richard as a murderous, physically deformed tyrant in Richard III. Although Richard’s skeleton, discovered beneath a Leicester car park in 2012, confirmed that he suffered from scoliosis, it showed nothing like the hunchback with the withered hand described by Tudor writers.
Suspect #2: Henry VII
Whilst Richard III is the near universal consensus amongst historians, an alternative suspect has been proposed, that being Henry VII. His claim, based on a maternal Lancastrian bloodline, a minor paternal relation and his victory at the Battle of Bosworth, was almost as contentious as Richard’s, if not more so. His most direct ancestor to Edward III was his mother, Margaret Beaufort, a great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt (Edward III’s third son). However, this line came from an affair and was originally born out of wedlock, though later made legal by Parliament with the condition that they were barred from the throne. His claim was only legitimised once he married Elizabeth of York following his defeat of Richard III on the field of battle. Not wanting the legitimacy of his wife or her claim as heir of Edward IV called into question, prior to the marriage he had repealed the Titulus Regius, which delegitimised not just the princes but also his wife. Supporters of this theory argue that the princes survived Richard III’s reign and were only murdered after Henry seized the throne in 1485, removing rival Yorkist claimants whose superior hereditary rights threatened his own rule. Had either Edward V or his younger brother Richard emerged alive after Bosworth, Henry’s own claim to the throne would have collapsed almost overnight. As the legitimate sons of Edward IV, both possessed a far stronger hereditary right than the new Tudor king. Their continued existence therefore represented a permanent political danger to his dynasty.
Some writers have suggested that Elizabeth Woodville’s sudden fall from royal favour may hint that she knew more about her sons’ fate than history has recorded. In 1487, Henry deprived her of many of her estates and she retired to Bermondsey Abbey, where she lived quietly until her death in 1492. The reasons for her withdrawal remain uncertain. Some historians have argued that Henry deliberately removed her from court because she knew of his alleged involvement in the princes’ deaths, although there is no contemporary evidence to support this claim. Others believe her retirement was voluntary or a sensible political precaution following the uprising of the pretender Lambert Simnel. Interestingly, Simnel was initially presented by some supporters as Richard, Duke of York, Elizabeth’s younger son, before his backers instead claimed he was Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, whose identity was considered more convincing. The episode demonstrated that, several years after the princes’ disappearance, rumours that at least one of them might still be alive were still circulating throughout England.
Historians have interpreted Henry’s silence on the matter in different ways. Some argue that it reflected guilty knowledge, while others believe there was simply little political advantage in reopening a mystery that already damaged Richard III’s reputation. In addition, Henry was never accused of the murders by any contemporary, which would have been politically advantageous to his allies. Even the Richard III Society, an organisation dedicated to reassessing Richard’s reputation, acknowledges the weakness of the case against Henry, arguing that “With Henry, as with Richard, there is no real evidence and one must suspect that if he had killed the princes himself he would quickly have produced the corpses and some ingeniously appropriate story implicating Richard.” It is also unlikely that the princes would have been kept alive in secret by Richard for two years after their last sighting while rumours of his responsibility for their murder circulated. For this reason, most historians continue to regard Henry VII as a considerably less likely suspect than Richard III. The theory depends upon both princes surviving Richard’s reign without leaving any convincing trace in the historical record – something for which there is no contemporary evidence.
Suspect #3: Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham
Suspicion has also fallen upon Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, Richard III’s closest political ally during his seizure of the throne. Unlike Henry VII, Buckingham was present in England during the princes’ disappearance and, as one of Richard’s most trusted supporters, may have had the opportunity to gain access to them. His later rebellion against Richard in October 1483 has led some historians to wonder whether relations between the two men had broken down over the princes’ fate. Buckingham also possessed a distant royal claim of his own. Through both his father and mother he descended from Edward III, giving him at least a theoretical claim to the English throne should the existing Yorkist line disappear. Alternatively, he may have been acting on behalf of a third party. His rebellion remains one of the greatest mysteries of Richard’s short reign. Historians still debate whether Buckingham rose against the king because he had been denied rewards, because he regretted helping Richard seize the throne, or because he was himself implicated in the disappearance of the princes. One of the most intriguing pieces of evidence comes from a contemporary Portuguese memorandum, which claimed that Richard entrusted the princes to Buckingham’s custody, where they were deliberately starved to death. A later English source likewise claimed that the murders were committed “by the vice [advice] of the Duke of Buckingham.”
This has led some to believe that Buckingham, and possibly Tyrell, acted independently of the King, slaying the princes without waiting for Richard’s orders. One historian noted that “After the King’s departure Buckingham was in effective command in the capital, and it is known that when the two men met a month later there was an unholy row between them.” However, if he were guilty of acting without Richard’s orders, it is extremely surprising that Richard did not lay the blame for the princes’ murder on Buckingham after Buckingham was disgraced and executed, especially as Richard could potentially have cleared his own name by doing so. However, some have claimed that Richard would have kept silent had Buckingham been guilty because nobody would have believed Richard was not involved in the crime. In addition to that, it is likely he would have required Richard’s help to gain access to the princes, under close guard in the Tower of London. Buckingham is the only alternative suspect, aside from Richard III himself, to be directly implicated in a contemporary source. Even so, the surviving evidence is fragmentary, and historians remain deeply divided over whether the accusations reflect genuine knowledge or little more than court gossip.
In 1674, workmen demolishing part of the Tower discovered the skeletons of two children beneath a staircase in the White Tower. Charles II ordered the remains reburied in Westminster Abbey, where they remain today. The inscription placed upon the urn confidently identifies them as Edward V and Richard, Duke of York, and that they were “suffocated by mattresses thrown upon them, their father’s brother Richard [III], perfidious usurper of the kingdom, ordered to be buried secretly and dishonourably.” However, the inscription reflects seventeenth-century belief rather than historical proof. The remains were never tested with Yorkist descendants to see if they actually were the princes. A second pair of children’s coffins were discovered in 1789 at St George’s Chapel in Windsor in a sealed tomb. The tomb was resealed and has remained that way ever since. We may ultimately never know what happened to the Princes in the Tower, whether they were murdered by their uncle, other scheming relatives or if they possibly lived their life out peaceably in France. Until any further investigations go forth, the case may forever remain unsolved.