Meanwhile Gloucester, busy manipulating the council called to decide plans for the coronation and government while Edward was a minor, was officially named Protector and Defender of the Realm. He also pushed the queen, who had sought sanctuary in Westminster Abbey, to surrender Richard to join his brother Edward in the Tower.
But sometime after 16 June Edward V and York were withdrawn to inner apartments.
No evidence was produced but an assembly of lords and commons deposed Edward V on 25 June. Richard proved an efficient and capable ruler but the fact that the Princes were never seen publicly again and the widespread belief that he had done away with them blackened his reputation: Both purported to be the long-lost Duke of York. In workmen found two skeletons at the base of the staircase to the chapel in the White Tower.
Following investigations by the royal surgeon and selected antiquaries, the remains were declared to be those of the Princes, and King Charles II had them reburied in an urn in Westminster Abbey. In the skeletons were re-examined using more modern scientific techniques and, while findings are not considered conclusive, they are generally thought consistent with two children of the ages of the Princes.
What if the Princes in the Tower survived into Tudor England?
Bones, circumstantial evidence, reports and rumours paint a poignant and bloody tale, but mystery still shrouds the full truth. The Inn on Loch Lomond. In light of this problem, it is striking that there was no recorded investigation or search for the bodies of the boys. The uncertainty over their fate would be demonstrated for more than a decade after Henry became king as pretenders appeared to threaten him. The Lambert Simnel Affair is traditionally remembered as an attempt to use an Oxford boy to impersonate Edward, Earl of Warwick, but there are a number of things that have never added up fully about this Yorkist plot.
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Why was her oldest son Thomas Grey, Marquis of Dorset arrested at the same time too? Henry VII ordered all of the records of the Irish Parliament that sat in destroyed, meaning it must have discussed something he wanted to make sure never saw the light of day.
The Princes in the Tower
The ability of Perkin Warbeck to torment Henry VII for so long was a direct result of the lack of certainty that the Princes were dead. Was there more to this than simply seeking to cause trouble for a fellow monarch? Bernard Andre and the Spanish ambassador Pedro de Ayala both described Perkin being beaten and disfigured after his capture, which might have been to hide these features, or at least his undoubtedly Plantagenet looks.
Amateur art historian Jack Leslau believed he had decoded secrets hidden within the family portrait of Sir Thomas More by Hans Holbein which point to an assumed identity used by the younger of the Princes in the Tower and he also believed he had discovered the secret identity of the older brother too. If true, the latter would have a seismic impact on the politics of the second half of the sixteenth century.
The contents of the urn were unearthed in Contemporary reports describe them being tossed onto a rubbish pile but when King Charles II heard of their discovery, he decided that they must belong to the Princes in the Tower and ordered them recovered and placed in the urn designed by Sir Christopher Wren. As a result, several other hypotheses about their fates have been proposed, including the suggestion that they were murdered by Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham or Henry VII , among others.
The Princes in the Tower
It has also been suggested that one or both princes may have escaped assassination. From until his capture in , Perkin Warbeck claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, having supposedly escaped to Flanders. Warbeck's claim was supported by some contemporaries including the aunt of the disappeared princes, Margaret of York. In , workmen at the Tower dug up a wooden box containing two small human skeletons. The bones were found in a box under the staircase in the Tower of London. The bones were widely accepted at the time as those of the princes, but this has not been proven and is far from certain.
The news reached Gloucester around 15 April, although he may have been forewarned of Edward's illness. Edward V and Gloucester set out for London from the west and north respectively, meeting at Stony Stratford on 29 April.
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Edward V and Gloucester arrived in London together. Plans continued for Edward's coronation, but the date was postponed from 4 May to 25 June. On 25 June, "a group of lords, knights and gentlemen" petitioned Richard to take the throne.
Dominic Mancini , an Italian friar who visited England in the s and who was in London in the spring and summer of , recorded that after Richard III seized the throne, Edward and his younger brother Richard were taken into the "inner apartments of the Tower" and then were seen less and less until they disappeared altogether. Mancini records that during this period Edward was regularly visited by a doctor, who reported that Edward, "like a victim prepared for sacrifice, sought remission of his sins by daily confession and penance, because he believed that death was facing him.
There are reports of the two princes being seen playing in the Tower grounds shortly after Richard joined his brother, but there are no recorded sightings of either of them after the summer of Many historians believe the princes were murdered, some suggesting that the act may have happened towards the end of summer Maurice Keen argues that the rebellion against Richard in initially "aimed to rescue Edward V and his brother from the Tower before it was too late", but that, when the Duke of Buckingham became involved, it shifted to support of Henry Tudor because "Buckingham almost certainly knew that the princes in the Tower were dead.
Sir Clements Markham suggests the princes may have been alive as late as July , pointing to the regulations issued by Richard III's household which stated: Other than their disappearance, there is no direct evidence that the princes were murdered, and "no reliable, well-informed, independent or impartial sources" for the associated events.
Only one contemporary narrative account of the boys' time in the tower exists: Mancini's account was not discovered until , in the Municipal Library in Lille. Later accounts written after the accession of Henry Tudor are often claimed to be biased or influenced by Tudor propaganda. Four unidentified bodies have been found which are considered possibly connected with the events of this period: Those found in the Tower were buried in Westminster Abbey , but the Abbey authorities have refused to allow either set of remains to be subjected to DNA analysis to positively identify them as the remains of the princes.
Several sources suggest there were rumours of the princes' deaths in the time following their disappearance. Rumours of murder also spread to France. Only Mancini's account is truly contemporary, having been written in London before November Markham, writing long before Mancini's account was discovered, argued that some accounts, including the Croyland Chronicle , might have been authored or heavily influenced by John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury , in order to incriminate Richard III.
Robert Fabyan 's Chronicles of London , compiled around 30 years after the princes' disappearance, names Richard as murderer. This identified Sir James Tyrrell as the murderer, acting on Richard's orders.
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Tyrrell was the loyal servant of Richard III who is said to have confessed to the murder of the princes before his execution for treason in In his history, More said that the princes were smothered to death in their beds by two agents of Tyrrell Miles Forrest and John Dighton and were then buried "at the stayre foote, metely depe in the grounde vnder a great heape of stones", but were later disinterred and buried in a secret place.
Polydore Vergil , in his Anglica Historia c. Holinshed's Chronicles , written in the second half of the 16th century, claims that the princes were murdered by Richard III. The chronicles were one of the main sources used by William Shakespeare for his play Richard III , which also portrays Richard as the murderer, in the sense that he commissions Tyrrell to have the boys killed. Pollard believes that the chronicle's account reflected the contemporary "standard and accepted account", but that by the time it was written "propaganda had been transformed into historical fact".
It should also be noted that Thomas More wrote his account with the intention of writing about a moral point rather than a closely mirrored history. Additionally, More's account is one of the bases for William Shakespeare's Richard III , which similarly indicts Richard for murdering the young princes. In , some workmen remodelling the Tower of London dug up a wooden box containing two small human skeletons.
They were not the first children's skeletons found within the tower; the bones of two children had previously been found "in an old chamber that had been walled up", which Pollard suggests could equally well have been those of the princes. However, More also stated that they were later moved to a "better place", [20] which does not match with the bones discovered. One anonymous report was that they were found with "pieces of rag and velvet about them"; the velvet could indicate that the bodies were those of aristocrats.
A monument designed by Christopher Wren marks the resting-place of the putative princes. The bones were removed and examined in , by the archivist of Westminster Abbey, Lawrence Tanner; a leading anatomist, Professor William Wright; and the president of the Dental Association, George Northcroft. By measuring certain bones and teeth, they concluded the bones belonged to two children around the correct ages for the princes. There were also three very rusty nails. One skeleton was larger than the other, but many of the bones were missing, including part of the smaller jawbone and all of the teeth from the larger one.
Many of the bones had been broken by the original workmen. Thus no attempt was even made to determine whether the bones were male or female. No further scientific examination has since been conducted on the bones, which remain in Westminster Abbey, and DNA analysis if DNA could be obtained has not been attempted. A petition was started on the British Government's "e-petition" website requesting that the bones be DNA tested but closed months before its expected close date.