Princes in the Tower (1483): The Mystery of Edward V and Richard

The Princes in the Tower were Edward V of England and his younger brother Richard, Duke of York, the sons of King Edward IV. In the spring of 1483 they were lodged in the Tower of London while their uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, took the throne as Richard III; by the end of that summer they had vanished from view and were never seen again. Their fate is one of the most debated mysteries in English history, and it has shaped the reputation of Richard III for more than five centuries.

Background: the death of Edward IV

Edward IV, the first Yorkist king, died unexpectedly at Westminster on 9 April 1483, aged 40. He had won the crown during the Wars of the Roses, the long struggle between the houses of York and Lancaster. His heir, Edward, was 12 years old and was living at Ludlow Castle in the Welsh Marches, under the guardianship of his maternal uncle Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers. The younger son, Richard, Duke of York, was 9.

A minor king needed someone to govern for him. Edward IV appears to have intended his brother Richard of Gloucester, the most trusted and experienced of his surviving kin, to act as Lord Protector. But the queen, Elizabeth Woodville, and her large family held many positions at court and were deeply unpopular with sections of the nobility. The stage was set for a struggle over who would control the young king.

The seizure of power, April to July 1483

Richard of Gloucester moved fast. On 30 April 1483 he and Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, intercepted the young king’s party at Stony Stratford in Buckinghamshire. They arrested Earl Rivers, the king’s half-brother Sir Richard Grey and his chamberlain Sir Thomas Vaughan, and took charge of Edward. On hearing the news, Elizabeth Woodville fled into sanctuary at Westminster Abbey with her younger son and daughters.

Richard escorted Edward into London on 4 May and was confirmed as Protector. Edward was lodged in the royal apartments of the Tower of London, which was then a royal palace as well as a fortress and the traditional residence of a monarch before coronation. His coronation was set for June.

On 13 June, at a council meeting in the Tower, Richard accused William, Lord Hastings, a loyal friend of Edward IV, of plotting against him. Hastings was beheaded the same day without trial. On 16 June, with the abbey surrounded by armed men, the queen was persuaded to release her younger son, who joined his brother in the Tower. The coronation was postponed.

On 22 June a preacher, Ralph Shaa, declared at St Paul’s Cross that Edward IV’s children were illegitimate. The argument, set out more fully in a petition to Richard and later in the parliamentary act known as Titulus Regius (1484), was that Edward IV had made a binding promise of marriage, a “precontract”, to Lady Eleanor Butler before he secretly married Elizabeth Woodville in 1464. If so, his marriage was invalid and his sons could not inherit.

On 25 June Rivers, Grey and Vaughan were executed at Pontefract. On 26 June Richard formally took the throne as Richard III, and he was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 6 July 1483. Edward V, who had reigned for less than three months without being crowned, was now simply “Lord Edward, bastard son of Edward IV” in official terms.

The disappearance

The best near-contemporary witness is Dominic Mancini, an Italian visitor who left England in July 1483 and wrote his account in France later that year. He reported that after Hastings’s death the princes were withdrawn into the inner apartments of the Tower and were seen less and less often behind its windows and bars, until they ceased to appear at all. He added that Edward’s doctor described the boy as preparing for death through daily confession and penance, and that many people already suspected he had been done away with, though Mancini did not know how.

By the autumn of 1483 rumours that the boys were dead were circulating widely. In January 1484 the French chancellor, Guillaume de Rochefort, told the Estates-General at Tours that Edward IV’s children had been murdered and the crown handed to their killer. The Crowland Chronicle, written in England in 1486, records that a rumour of their deaths spread during the rebellion of autumn 1483, without saying whether it was true.

No public announcement was ever made, no bodies were shown and no funeral was held. Richard III never produced the boys to disprove the rumours, which many historians regard as telling, though others note that he had no legal reason to do so once they had been declared illegitimate.

In October 1483 a rebellion broke out in southern England and Wales. Its leaders included the Duke of Buckingham, until then Richard’s closest ally, and supporters of the exiled Lancastrian claimant Henry Tudor. The rising had begun with aims of restoring Edward V, but by the time it broke out its backers had switched to Henry, apparently because they believed the princes were dead. Henry promised to marry Edward IV’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, uniting the claims of both houses.

The rebellion failed. Buckingham was captured and executed at Salisbury on 2 November 1483. Henry Tudor stayed in exile in Brittany and France until 1485.

The suspects

Richard III remains the leading suspect. He had the clearest motive, since living princes could become a focus for rebellion, and he controlled the Tower and its staff. Most contemporaries who wrote about the matter assumed he was responsible.

Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham has been suggested because he was powerful, close to the boys in the summer of 1483 and had his own distant royal claim. Some later writers record a rumour against him, but there is no direct evidence.

Henry VII, who became king after the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, is proposed by some defenders of Richard. If the princes were alive in 1485, they would have stood in his way, especially after he repealed Titulus Regius to legitimise his wife Elizabeth of York, which also made her brothers legitimate again. Against this, there is no sign the boys were seen alive after 1483.

Other theories hold that one or both boys survived, were smuggled abroad or lived under false names. Some modern researchers have argued for survival on the basis of newly examined archival documents, but these claims remain disputed and have not won general acceptance among historians.

Thomas More’s account

The story most people know comes from Sir Thomas More’s History of King Richard III, written around 1513 but left unfinished. More wrote that Richard ordered Sir James Tyrell to kill the boys, and that two men, Miles Forest and John Dighton, smothered them in their beds with pillows and buried them at the foot of a staircase. Tyrell, executed for treason in 1502, was said to have confessed.

More had access to people who had lived through the events, including his patron Cardinal John Morton, a fierce opponent of Richard. But no record of Tyrell’s confession survives, More’s work contains errors and literary set pieces, and it was written under the Tudors. Historians treat it as an important but partisan source. Shakespeare drew on it for his play Richard III in the 1590s.

The bones and the pretenders

In 1674 workmen removing a staircase by the White Tower in the Tower of London found a wooden chest containing the bones of two children, about ten feet (3 m) below ground. Because the find seemed to match More’s account, Charles II had the bones placed in a marble urn designed by Sir Christopher Wren in Westminster Abbey in 1678.

In 1933 the urn was opened and the remains examined by the anatomist William Wright and the abbey archivist Lawrence Tanner. They concluded the bones belonged to two children of roughly 12 to 13 and 9 to 11 years and judged them consistent with the princes. Later specialists have criticised the study: the sex of the children was not established, the bones were mixed with animal remains, and the dating was not scientific. Requests for radiocarbon dating and DNA testing have not been granted, so the identity of the remains is unconfirmed.

Uncertainty about the princes haunted the first Tudor king. From 1491 a young man later identified as Perkin Warbeck claimed to be Richard, Duke of York. He was recognised by Margaret of Burgundy, Edward IV’s sister, and received at the courts of Scotland and the Holy Roman Emperor. After a failed landing in Cornwall in 1497 he was captured; he confessed to being the son of a boatman’s family from Tournai and was hanged at Tyburn in 1499.

A separate earlier pretender, Lambert Simnel, claimed in 1487 to be Edward, Earl of Warwick, the princes’ cousin, not one of the princes themselves.

Myths and facts

• Myth: The princes were held as prisoners in a dungeon. Fact: They were lodged in the royal apartments of the Tower, then a royal residence; their confinement became stricter over the summer of 1483.
• Myth: It is proven that the bones in Westminster Abbey are theirs. Fact: The identification rests on location and a 1933 examination; it has never been confirmed by modern scientific testing.
• Myth: Elizabeth Woodville’s reconciliation with Richard proves he was innocent. Fact: In March 1484 she left sanctuary and her daughters came to court under Richard’s protection. Historians interpret this in different ways, including as a pragmatic decision by a widow with few options.

Timeline

• 1470, 2 November: Edward, the future Edward V, is born in Westminster sanctuary.
• 1473, 17 August: Richard, Duke of York, is born at Shrewsbury.
• 1483, 9 April: Edward IV dies; his son becomes Edward V.
• 1483, 30 April: Richard of Gloucester takes control of Edward V at Stony Stratford.
• 1483, 16 June: The younger prince is released from sanctuary and joins his brother in the Tower.
• 1483, 26 June: Richard takes the throne; he is crowned Richard III on 6 July.
• 1483, October: Buckingham’s rebellion; rumours of the princes’ deaths spread.
• 1485, 22 August: Richard III is killed at Bosworth; Henry VII becomes king.
• 1674: Bones of two children are found at the Tower of London.
• 1933: The remains in Westminster Abbey are examined.

Why it matters

The disappearance of the Princes in the Tower ended the direct male line of Edward IV and helped bring about the fall of Richard III and the rise of the Tudors. It is also a lesson in how history is written: the surviving evidence is fragmentary and much of it comes from the winners, which is why the case still divides historians and fascinates the public.