What Happened to the Princes in the Tower?

Background

Edward IV, King of England, died suddenly in April 1483, leaving his twelve-year-old son Edward V as heir. Edward IV's brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was named Lord Protector for the young king's minority. Richard took custody of Edward V and, shortly afterward, of Edward's nine-year-old brother Richard, Duke of York, housing both boys in the Tower of London, at the time a royal residence as much as a prison, ostensibly in preparation for Edward's coronation.

Before the coronation could take place, a clergyman named Ralph Shaa preached a sermon asserting that Edward IV's marriage to the boys' mother, Elizabeth Woodville, was invalid because of a prior undisclosed marriage contract, or pre-contract, between Edward IV and a noblewoman named Eleanor Butler. Parliament formalised this claim in the Titulus Regius act of 1484, declaring both princes illegitimate and therefore ineligible to inherit the throne. Richard was proclaimed king as Richard III in June 1483. The princes were seen playing in the Tower grounds into the summer of 1483; after that, no reliable contemporary account records seeing them again, and by autumn rumours that they had been killed were already circulating in London and abroad.

In July 1674, workmen renovating a staircase at the Tower of London uncovered a wooden box containing two small human skeletons. King Charles II, accepting them as the princes' remains, had them interred in Westminster Abbey in an urn later designed by the architect Christopher Wren. A brief examination in 1933 measured the bones and judged their size consistent with the princes' ages at disappearance, but could not establish sex or cause of death with the forensic techniques then available. No modern forensic or DNA analysis has ever been permitted; requests, including one tied to a 2023 television documentary, have been declined.

Main Theories

Richard III ordered their murder

This is the traditional and still most widely held view among historians. It rests substantially on two written sources. Dominic Mancini, an Italian visitor to London in 1483, wrote an account shortly after leaving England that reported the princes had stopped appearing in public and that many believed them already dead, based on what he had heard secondhand rather than direct knowledge. Decades later, Thomas More's unfinished "History of King Richard III", written under Henry VIII around 1513, supplied the story's most detailed and famous version, including the specific claim that Richard ordered the boys smothered in their sleep. Because More wrote under Tudor patronage, more than a generation after events he did not witness, his account is treated by historians as a valuable but not fully independent source, shaped in part by the Tudor dynasty's interest in blackening its Yorkist predecessor's reputation.

The case for Richard's guilt does not rest on More alone. Richard had clear practical motive as Protector-turned-king to remove rival claimants to a throne he had just taken by setting aside the normal succession, and no other credible explanation for the princes' disappearance was offered by contemporaries, several of whom, including foreign diplomats reporting home, treated their deaths as accepted fact within Richard's own reign, not as a later Tudor invention.

An alternative culprit

A substantial body of revisionist historians, including scholarship associated with the Richard III Society, argues the case against Richard is weaker than its traditional telling suggests. They note Richard never publicly displayed the princes' bodies or formally accused anyone of their murder, an unusual omission if removing a security threat was the point, and observe that Henry VII's 1485 Act of Attainder against Richard, passed immediately after Henry took the throne by force, lists numerous charges against Richard but does not specifically accuse him of murdering the princes, arguably the most damning charge available had it been public knowledge at the time.

The leading alternative suspect is Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, Richard's closest ally through mid-1483, who had access to the Tower and his own Lancastrian bloodline claim, before rebelling against Richard later that same year for reasons that remain historically unclear. A separate strand of revisionist argument proposes the princes survived into Henry VII's reign and were killed afterward, on the theory that Henry, having taken the throne partly by right of conquest with a comparatively weak hereditary claim of his own, had at least as much motive as Richard to eliminate two legitimate Yorkist heirs. Neither alternative has produced positive documentary evidence of its own; both proceed by identifying weaknesses in the traditional case and proposing a plausible substitute rather than new proof.

Common Misconceptions

The bones in Westminster Abbey are frequently described in popular accounts as confirmed to be the princes. They are not: the 1933 examination could not determine sex, and no DNA testing has ever taken place, so their identity, and even their exact dates of death, remain formally unconfirmed rather than established fact.

Thomas More's account is sometimes dismissed outright as pure Tudor propaganda, or conversely treated as an eyewitness record; neither extreme matches how historians actually use it. More was a serious, well-connected scholar writing within living memory of some participants' children, drawing on information from figures close to the events, including, by his own account, a man who claimed to have been present, so his narrative carries real historical weight even though it was written decades later under a rival dynasty and cannot be treated as a neutral, contemporary transcript.

Current Consensus

Most professional historians of the period continue to regard Richard III as the most probable person responsible for the princes' deaths, based on his clear motive, his contemporaries' near-immediate belief that they were dead, and the absence of any credible sighting of either boy alive after mid-1483. This is treated as the historical record's best-supported reading, not as settled certainty: a substantial minority of serious historians consider the case against Richard circumstantial and incomplete, and specifically dispute that the traditional narrative meets the standard of proof its confidence often implies. What is not disputed is that the princes disappeared from the historical record in 1483 and were never seen alive again by any account historians consider reliable.

Why This Mystery Endures

The case endures because it combines a real, still-unresolved historical crime with a political stake that has never fully faded: Richard III's reputation remains actively contested more than five centuries later, championed by dedicated historical societies and revisited in each generation's popular history and fiction, from Shakespeare's Tudor-era portrait of a scheming villain to modern revisionist biographies arguing he was traduced. Few historical mysteries have an advocacy organisation, the Richard III Society, still actively working to overturn the traditional verdict, a living reminder that this "cold case" still has people invested in its outcome.

The unexamined bones do the rest of the work, in the same way physical evidence withheld from testing keeps other cases open long after the historical record has otherwise settled, echoing how questions about the Somerton Man persisted for decades until forensic genealogy finally reached his exhumed remains. Westminster Abbey's continued refusal to permit DNA analysis means the one piece of evidence that could most directly settle the case, or at minimum confirm whether the bones even belong to the right period and sex, remains permanently just out of reach, keeping the mystery formally open by policy rather than by any real scientific obstacle. The case is part of this site's broader historical mysteries coverage of disputed events and unresolved identities.