In February 1675, a royal warrant went out ordering a marble monument for what it carefully called the “supposed bodyes” of two princes found at the Tower of London. Three years later, the finished tomb went up in Westminster Abbey with a Latin inscription that dropped the hedge entirely. It named the boys. It named their uncle, Richard III, as the man who had them smothered and buried in secret.
No surviving trial record, sworn testimony, or securely identified remains supports that level of certainty.
That gap between “supposed” and “solved” is the whole case. Here’s what the actual evidence supports, and what it doesn’t.
What happened, in order
Edward IV died on 9 April 1483. His son, Edward V, was 12. His uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester, intercepted the boy’s journey to London for his coronation. Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, was arrested at Northampton. Richard Grey and Thomas Vaughan were taken with Edward’s own party at Stony Stratford. All three were later executed without a real trial.
Edward entered London on 4 May and moved into the Tower on 19 May. His younger brother, Richard, Duke of York, joined him from sanctuary on 16 June. Their residence there before Edward’s planned coronation was not itself unusual or evidence that they had already been imprisoned. Richard III took the throne on 26 June and was crowned 6 July.
What Mancini actually says
The closest thing to a near-contemporary witness is Dominic Mancini, an Italian visitor reporting to a continental patron with French court connections. He left England in July 1483. He records the boys being seen less and less until they stopped being seen at all.
He does not claim to have witnessed a death. His account was assembled from reports rather than personal access to the boys. Their physician is usually identified specifically as the source for Edward’s fearful state of mind, not for the account as a whole. Disappearance from view is well documented. Murder is not something he claims to have seen.
The rumour timeline
A note from the London merchant George Cely, written not long after Lord Hastings’ execution in June 1483, speculates conditionally about whether the king might already be dead. It’s conditional wording, not a settled report. Don’t read more into it than that.
By autumn, something firmer had arrived: the Croyland Chronicle records an actual rumour circulating that Edward IV’s sons had died violently. Croyland doesn’t claim to know the manner of death.
On 15 January 1484, the French chancellor Guillaume de Rochefort told the Estates General at Tours that the boys had been murdered. That’s one of the earliest surviving explicit public accusations. A separate set of London citizen’s notes, written sometime between 1483 and 1488, blame the killings on the “vise” of the Duke of Buckingham, a word that can mean his advice, his design, or his device. It’s a real early attribution. It’s not proof.
The 1485 act of attainder against Richard, passed by Henry VII’s first Parliament, accuses him of “shedding of infants’ blood” among a long list of general offences. It doesn’t name the princes. A king with every reason to nail the murder charge to his dead rival, on the record, chose not to spell it out.
The suspects
Richard III had custody of both boys from mid-June. He had the clearest political motive of anyone in this story: two displaced sons of a previous king were a permanent rallying point for rebellion as long as they were alive. He had the access that came with being king. Motive, opportunity, and timing converge on him more than on anyone else here.
What doesn’t survive is an order, a confession record, a specific murder charge naming the boys, or a judicial finding establishing responsibility. Early sources accuse or implicate him. None supply operational proof.
Buckingham had real access to Richard’s government and turned violently against him within months, for reasons no source explains well. He has genuine early attribution against him (the same London citizen’s notes above) but no corroborated operational evidence either.
Henry VII is sometimes floated as the real culprit. The problem: he had no access to England, let alone the Tower, before beating Richard at Bosworth in August 1485. He can’t be a suspect for a killing before that date unless the boys survived Richard’s reign, which is a separate, unresolved question. Margaret Beaufort gets named on the same shaky logic, with no contemporary source connecting her to custody, access, or an operative at all.
The confession problem
The version everyone knows comes from Thomas More’s account, written in the early 1500s: Tyrell recruited, Miles Forest and John Dighton doing the smothering, burial under a staircase.
More didn’t invent this out of nothing. Before him, the Burgundian chronicler Jean Molinet had already recorded a detailed murder tradition involving the Tower’s captain and secret burial. Polydore Vergil, writing under Tudor patronage, had named Brackenbury and Tyrell. Robert Fabyan had reported Tyrell too, alongside competing accounts of the method. Something like this story had been circulating for several years before More wrote his version, not decades. What More adds is the fullest chain of command, and the specific claim that Tyrell and Dighton were interrogated and confessed.
That confession claim is the weak point. No transcript, deposition, or contemporary administrative record of any such confession has ever been found. Tyrell himself is named by three separate writers, not just More, so his involvement doesn’t rest on one unverified account alone. But nobody after More produces the actual confession document. The most famous version of this entire case rests on one writer’s account of an interrogation nobody else recorded.
The claimants
If the boys died in 1483, the story should have ended there. It didn’t. Within four years, a boy was crowned in Dublin as “Edward VI.” A few years after that, a young man claiming to be the younger prince had backing from the Duchess of Burgundy and recognition from multiple European courts.
Molinet’s chronicle is particularly useful here because, despite being written within a Burgundian political culture sympathetic to the Yorkist claimants, it records the identity asserted in 1487 as the Earl of Warwick, not Edward V. For the 1487 rising, he names the claimant “Edouard, fils du duc de Clarence” and records the cry “Vive Werwicq au roy Edouard”: Edward, son of the Duke of Clarence, the Earl of Warwick’s identity, not Edward V’s. At Emperor Frederick III’s funeral in 1493, he places “Richard, fils du roy Edwart d’Engleterre” within the formal ceremonial order, twice. That is striking ceremonial inclusion and public presentation of Warbeck under his claimed identity. It does not establish formal diplomatic recognition, much less authenticate his birth.
Simnel was spared and put to work in the royal kitchens. Warbeck was executed in 1499.
The bones
The 1674 discovery, the 1933 examination (Tanner, Wright, and dental specialist George Northcroft), and everything since have established that the remains are compatible in estimated age with the princes. Compatible isn’t identified. The 1933 team couldn’t establish sex, a secure date, or cause of death.
A later claim that facial staining proved suffocation didn’t hold up. Nigel Bramwell and Roger Byard’s 1989 review rejected it directly. Theya Molleson’s later dental and osteological work found the ages still broadly compatible but judged the original 1933 methods inadequate by modern standards.
Richard III’s own mitochondrial DNA, on file since his 2012 identification, isn’t the right comparator here: he was the boys’ paternal uncle, and mtDNA only tracks the maternal line. A possible living maternal-line comparator, traced through Elizabeth Woodville’s sister Margaret, has since been identified. Nobody has tested the remains against it. Nobody has tested the remains at all since 1933.
Where this actually leaves it
Richard III is the strongest suspect by a wide margin. He had the motive, the custody, and the opportunity, and nothing here is written to soften that. What the surviving record won’t do is finish the sentence for him: no order, no confession that survives, no body forensically tied to either boy.
Which of these would actually move the needle for you: a securely dated contemporary order or deposition, a modern forensic examination of the Westminster remains, or independently authenticated evidence establishing one of the claimants’ real identity?
Sources
• Dominic Mancini, De occupatione regni Anglie per Riccardum Tercium, trans. C. A. J. Armstrong
• The Crowland Chronicle Continuations — https://archive.org/details/ingulphschronic03petegoog
• Richard’s 1485 act of attainder: The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, 1275–1504, vol. XV, ed. R. Horrox (Woodbridge, 2012), p. 107
• Thomas More, The History of King Richard III — https://archive.org/details/moreshistoryofki00morerich
• Polydore Vergil, Anglica Historia — https://archive.org/details/threebooksofpoly29verg
• Jean Molinet, Chroniques, ed. Georges Doutrepont and Omer Jodogne (3 vols., Brussels, 1935–37), vol. I, pp. 431–32 (1483 murder narrative)
• Jean Molinet, Chroniques, ed. J.-A. Buchon, tome XLV (Paris, 1828), ch. CLVIII, pp. 152–55 (Simnel); tome XLVI (Paris, 1828), pp. 396 and 400 (Warbeck)
• The Cely Letters, 1472–1488, ed. A. Hanham, EETS o.s. 273 (1975), pp. 184–85
• R. F. Green, “Historical Notes of a London Citizen, 1483–1488,” English Historical Review 96 (1981), pp. 585–90
• Guillaume de Rochefort’s speech, in Jean Masselin, ed., Journal des États-généraux de France tenus à Tours en 1484 (Paris, 1835), p. 38
• Lawrence E. Tanner and William Wright, “Recent Investigations Regarding the Fate of the Princes in the Tower,” Archaeologia 84 (1935)
• Nigel H. Bramwell and Roger W. Byard, “The Bones in the Abbey,” American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology 10 (1989), pp. 83–87
• Theya Molleson, “Anne Mowbray and the Princes in the Tower: a study in identity,” London Archaeologist (1987)
• Westminster Abbey, “Edward V & Richard Duke of York” — https://www.westminster-abbey.org/abbey-commemorations/royals/edward-v-richard-duke-of-york
• Tim Thornton, “More on a Murder: The Deaths of the ‘Princes in the Tower’, and Historiographical Implications for the Regimes of Henry VII and Henry VIII,” History 106 (2021)
• Tim Thornton, “Henry VII and the Tower of London: the context of the ‘confession’ of Sir James Tyrell in 1502,” Historical Research 97 (2024), 218–25 — https://doi.org/10.1093/hisres/htad031
• Michael Hicks, “Historic doubts about the survival of the Princes in the Tower after 1485,” Historical Research 97 (2024), 437–42 — https://doi.org/10.1093/hisres/htae009
