The Princes in the Tower: Two Boys Who Vanished and the King Who Needed Them Gone

The Tower Was Not a Prison — Not at First

When twelve-year-old Edward V arrived at the Tower of London in May 1483, it was not a place of punishment. The Tower was, in that era, the traditional residence of kings awaiting their coronations. It was fortified, yes — a complex of stone buildings and courtyards inside the ancient walls, staffed by servants, furnished with appropriate rooms. The boy was brought there by his uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who had assumed the role of Lord Protector after the sudden death of Edward IV. Gloucester was the king's uncle. The Tower was the expected place. The coronation was scheduled for June 22.

It did not happen. Nothing that was expected happened after May 1483.

Edward's younger brother, Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York — nine years old — joined him at the Tower in June under circumstances that immediately disturbed contemporaries. The boys' mother, Elizabeth Woodville, had taken sanctuary at Westminster Abbey following the death of her husband. She was not inclined to release her younger son. Richard of Gloucester pressured her. The Archbishop of Canterbury interceded. Eventually Elizabeth Woodville surrendered Richard of Shrewsbury to the custody of his uncle, reportedly because continuing to withhold him would have appeared politically provocative. She would later say she had no choice. She was probably right.

From this point on, the two boys were in the Tower together. Accounts written in the weeks immediately following describe them playing in the Tower's grounds, visible to those outside. Then, gradually, the sightings thin. By late summer of 1483, the boys have stopped appearing. The accounts go quiet in a way that, across five centuries of historical inquiry, has never been adequately explained.

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The Usurpation

On June 26, 1483 — four days after the cancelled coronation — Richard of Gloucester was declared King Richard III of England. The mechanism by which this happened is itself a subject of historical controversy, but the central instrument was a petition called Titulus Regius, presented to Richard by an assembly of lords and commons. The petition argued that the marriage of Edward IV to Elizabeth Woodville had been invalid because Edward had been pre-contracted — secretly betrothed or married — to Lady Eleanor Butler before he wed Elizabeth. If that pre-contract was valid, Edward IV's children were illegitimate. They could not inherit. Richard, as the next legitimate male heir, became king.

The evidence for the pre-contract was produced by Robert Stillington, the Bishop of Bath and Wells. No independent corroboration has ever been found. The timing — produced precisely when it was needed to remove two children from succession — is notable.

For Richard to secure the throne, the boys needed to be not merely removed from the line of succession but removed from the board entirely. A living, illegitimate Edward V was a permanent rallying point for anyone who wished to challenge Richard's right to rule. The boys' illegitimacy was a legal fiction that could be reversed. The boys themselves could not be un-existed.

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The Last Sightings

Dominic Mancini, an Italian visitor to England who was present in London during the summer of 1483 and wrote a contemporary account, records that by the time he left England shortly after Richard's coronation, Edward V had been withdrawn into the inner apartments of the Tower and was rarely seen. He noted that the boy had been seen less and less frequently, and that those around him feared for his life. The physician attending Edward was, Mancini records, in tears — the boy had made his confession as if he expected death.

Thomas More, writing roughly thirty years after the events based on accounts from people who had been present, describes the boys being moved deeper into the Tower's buildings, access restricted, servants reduced. He names Sir James Tyrell as the man who organized the murder on Richard's orders, and provides a detailed — perhaps too detailed — account of the killings: the princes smothered in their beds at night, their bodies buried at the base of a staircase in the Tower.

More's account is the most cited, the most detailed, and the most disputed. He wrote it under a Tudor monarchy that had every political reason to maintain that Richard III was a murderer. More himself was a small child in 1483 and was not present. He names his sources — but those sources are difficult to corroborate independently, and some details in his account are demonstrably wrong on other matters, which has led historians to treat the entire account with caution.

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The Bones

In 1674, workmen renovating a staircase in the Tower of London discovered a wooden chest buried beneath the stone steps. Inside were the skeletal remains of two children. Charles II ordered the bones placed in an urn in Westminster Abbey, where they rest today beneath a marble monument. The inscription identifies them as the probable remains of Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury.

In 1933, the bones were briefly examined by two men: Lawrence Tanner, an archivist, and William Wright, a dental surgeon. Their examination — conducted on the urn's contents over a single session, without modern forensic equipment — concluded that the remains were consistent with the ages of the two princes at the time of their disappearance. The older set of bones showed signs of a jaw disease that could have caused prolonged pain, which matched a suggestion in Mancini's account that Edward had been ill.

No DNA testing has been conducted. The Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey controls access to the urn and has consistently declined requests for further examination. The most recent formal request, made in 2013, was refused. The remains have not been scientifically dated. Their species — human — has not been definitively confirmed by modern analysis. Everything about the 1933 examination is preliminary by contemporary standards, and its conclusions have been disputed by forensic specialists who have reviewed the methodology.

If the bones are those of the princes, a DNA comparison with living descendants of their maternal relatives could potentially confirm identity. Richard III himself was exhumed in Leicester in 2012 and positively identified through mitochondrial DNA matched against a living descendant of his sister. The same technique could, in principle, be applied to the Tower bones. It has not been.

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The Suspects

Richard III is the traditional suspect and remains the most likely one by weight of motive, means, and opportunity. He controlled the Tower. He needed the boys gone. He had demonstrably moved against their interests — cancelling the coronation, having them declared illegitimate, imprisoning their Woodville supporters. The contemporary accounts, thin as they are, point toward him.

But the case against Richard is not closed. Other suspects have been proposed.

Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, was Richard's closest ally during the usurpation and had extraordinary access to the Tower before he broke with Richard and led an unsuccessful rebellion in autumn 1483. Some historians have argued that Buckingham had his own dynastic ambitions and could have arranged the deaths independently. This theory was advanced explicitly by Sir Thomas More in a variant of his own account, and it shifts culpability without exonerating Richard — both men were in a position to act.

Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII after defeating Richard at Bosworth in 1485, is occasionally proposed. He controlled the Tower from August 1485. If the princes survived Richard's reign and were killed under early Tudor custody, the subsequent silence would be equally well explained. Henry VII's suppression of Titulus Regius — he ordered all copies destroyed and made possessing one a felony — is cited as suspicious: a king secure in his legitimacy would not have needed to erase the document that declared his predecessors illegitimate.

The most haunting complication is Perkin Warbeck, a pretender who emerged in 1491 claiming to be Richard of Shrewsbury — the younger prince, escaped and alive. Warbeck attracted support from European courts and launched multiple challenges to Henry VII's throne before being captured and executed in 1499. Henry VII consistently refused to engage with Warbeck's claim on its merits, preferring to attack him as an impostor. Whether Warbeck was genuinely deluded, a political instrument, or something more complicated has never been settled.

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The Silence of the Institutions

What makes the Princes in the Tower genuinely unsolvable — or what makes its solution politically sensitive — is not the absence of evidence but the presence of it in places that remain inaccessible.

The bones in Westminster Abbey could be tested. They have not been. The decision sits with an institution that has declined to act on multiple formal requests. The reasons given range from reverence for royal remains to uncertainty about what useful conclusions could be drawn. The subtext, which historians have noted for decades, is that the conclusions might be definitive in ways that are uncomfortable — either confirming the bones as the princes and forcing the question of who killed them, or revealing them as not the princes and raising the question of what happened to the actual remains.

Five hundred and forty-three years after two boys vanished from a guarded royal residence in the centre of London, the answer may be sitting in an urn in Westminster Abbey, waiting for permission to speak.

The Most Overlooked Detail: The Timing of Buckingham's Rebellion

Historical attention to the Princes in the Tower has focused overwhelmingly on Richard III's motive and the Thomas More account. The detail most consistently underweighted is the chronological relationship between the princes' disappearance and the Duke of Buckingham's rebellion in October 1483.

Buckingham was Richard's closest collaborator during the usurpation. He was given extraordinary rewards — enormous land grants, the office of Constable of England, effective control of Wales. He had more access to the Tower during summer 1483 than almost any other individual outside Richard's immediate household. Then, in autumn 1483, Buckingham abruptly reversed course, joined a conspiracy against Richard, and was captured and executed in November.

The detail that has not received sufficient analytical weight is what the rebellion was nominally organized around. The initial conspiracy — which coalesced around the Woodville family and former supporters of Edward IV — appears to have begun on the assumption that the princes were alive and could be liberated. By the time the rebellion actually launched in October, the objective had shifted: the conspirators were rallying behind Henry Tudor, not behind rescuing the princes. This shift implies that, sometime between the conspiracy's formation in summer 1483 and its October launch, the conspirators concluded that the princes were already dead. This gives us a rough terminus ante quem for the murders: the princes were either known or believed dead by October 1483, well within Richard's period of unchallenged control of the Tower.

The Narrative Inconsistency: More's Account and Its Convenient Precision

Thomas More's account of the murder — Sir James Tyrell organizing two men, John Dighton and Miles Forrest, to smother the princes in their sleep — is remarkable for its specificity. More names the killers. He describes the method. He describes the burial site. He attributes a later confession to Dighton and a death-in-service to Forrest. The specificity is exactly what makes the account suspect.

The inconsistency is this: More's account was written under Henry VIII, approximately thirty years after the events. Tyrell had been executed in 1502 — for unrelated treason — and could not speak. Forrest was reportedly dead. Dighton, More says, was still living and had confessed. But Dighton was never prosecuted. If Dighton had genuinely confessed to the murder of two royal princes, his non-prosecution is extraordinary. The most parsimonious explanation is that More's account is a reconstruction — possibly based on real testimony, possibly substantially invented — that served the political purpose of attributing the murders definitively to the Ricardian regime. This does not mean Richard III was innocent. It means the principal narrative source for how the murders occurred is not reliable in its details, and investigators who have treated it as eyewitness testimony have been misled.

The Key Unanswered Question: Why Have the Bones Not Been Tested?

The core unanswered question is not who killed the princes — the weight of evidence points toward Richard III's administration, with Buckingham as an alternative — but why the bones in Westminster Abbey have not been subjected to modern forensic analysis.

A DNA comparison is technically achievable. Richard III's mitochondrial DNA, confirmed in 2013, traces through female lines. The princes shared a maternal line with their sisters — several of whom have documented descendants. A mitochondrial DNA comparison between the Tower bones and a living descendant of, say, Elizabeth of York's female line would determine whether the bones are royal with high confidence. The refusal to permit this, reiterated across multiple decades and multiple formal requests, is the single most consequential unanswered procedural question in the case. Whether it reflects institutional caution, sensitivity about the Church of England's role in managing royal remains, or something more specific to what such a test might reveal, it means that a potentially definitive piece of evidence sits in a marble urn in Westminster Abbey while historians argue on the basis of incomplete medieval chronicles.