In April 1483 Edward IV died unexpectedly at just 40, and the English crown passed to his elder son, Edward V — a boy of twelve. The new king never reached his coronation. His uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester, named Lord Protector, intercepted the royal party at Stony Stratford, arrested the boy's maternal relatives and escorted him to the Tower of London. That in itself was not sinister: the Tower was a royal residence and the traditional lodging of monarchs awaiting coronation. In June the king's nine-year-old brother, Richard, Duke of York, was handed over from sanctuary at Westminster Abbey to join him.
Then the story turned. On 22 June a sermon at St Paul's Cross declared the boys illegitimate, on the claim that Edward IV had been pre-contracted to marry Lady Eleanor Butler before his marriage to their mother, Elizabeth Woodville. Their uncle was crowned Richard III on 6 July 1483, and Parliament later enshrined the argument in an act known as Titulus Regius, in January 1484. That summer, according to Dominic Mancini — an Italian visitor whose eyewitness account lay unread in a French archive until 1934 — the princes were withdrawn into the Tower's inner apartments and seen more and more rarely behind the windows, until they ceased to appear at all. Their physician, John Argentine, told Mancini that young Edward made daily confession because he believed death was coming. By the autumn, rumours that the boys were dead were widespread enough to help fuel the Duke of Buckingham's rebellion against Richard.
The bones under the staircase
The most famous account of what happened came some thirty years later from Thomas More: Richard, he wrote, had Sir James Tyrell arrange the murder, and two men smothered the boys in their beds before burying them "at a stair foot, meetly deep in the ground". More was writing under the Tudors, from hearsay, decades after the fact — but in 1674 his story received an eerie echo. Workmen demolishing a staircase attached to the White Tower found, roughly ten feet down, a wooden chest containing the skeletons of two children. Charles II accepted them as the princes and had them reburied in Westminster Abbey in a marble urn designed by Sir Christopher Wren. When the urn was opened in 1933, two examiners judged the remains consistent with children of about twelve and ten — but their study assumed the identification from the outset, could not determine the sex of the bones, and by modern standards proved very little. No scientific re-examination has been permitted since; requests for DNA testing have been declined.
What a cold-case review can say
A modern review has three principal suspects. Richard III had custody, motive and opportunity — and, most damningly, never produced the boys alive when the rumours were wrecking his reputation. The Duke of Buckingham, executed in November 1483, had access and royal ambitions of his own. Henry VII, who took the throne at Bosworth in 1485, needed the princes dead as much as Richard did: his first Parliament repealed Titulus Regius and ordered copies destroyed, which re-legitimised the boys — and made Edward V, if he lived, the rightful king. But Henry had been in exile across the Channel until August 1485, two years after the princes vanished. The problem haunted him regardless: in the 1490s a young man named Perkin Warbeck toured the courts of Europe claiming to be Richard, Duke of York, and was recognised by Margaret of Burgundy, the princes' aunt. Captured in 1497, Warbeck confessed to imposture — possibly under duress — and was hanged in 1499.
The case acquired a scientific afterlife in 2012, when Richard III's own skeleton was found beneath a Leicester car park, identified through mitochondrial DNA and its scoliosis-curved spine, and reburied in Leicester Cathedral in 2015. Philippa Langley, who drove that search, went on to lead the Missing Princes Project, arguing in a 2023 book that continental archives support the boys' survival and Warbeck's claim. Most historians remain unconvinced. The episode showed what modern methods can do — and where they stop. Without permission to test the bones in Wren's urn against royal DNA already on file, the central physical evidence stays sealed in marble.
The verdict of most historians still names Richard III as the likeliest culprit, on circumstantial evidence no courtroom would love. The Tower keeps the rest.
Quiz nuggets
- Edward V and his brother Richard, Duke of York, were twelve and nine when they entered the Tower of London in 1483.
- Their uncle was crowned Richard III on 6 July 1483, after a petition declared the boys illegitimate; Parliament formally enshrined the argument in the act Titulus Regius later, in January 1484.
- In 1674 workmen found two children's skeletons under a Tower staircase; Charles II had them placed in a Christopher Wren-designed urn in Westminster Abbey.
- The pretender Perkin Warbeck claimed to be the younger prince, won backing from Margaret of Burgundy, and was hanged in 1499.
- Richard III's skeleton was found under a Leicester car park in 2012 and reburied in Leicester Cathedral in 2015.