What happened to the Princes in the Tower?

In April 1483 Edward IV died suddenly and his twelve-year-old son became Edward V. Within weeks the boy and his nine-year-old brother were lodged in the Tower by their uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, 'for their protection'. By July Richard was king, and the boys were never seen alive again. In 1674 workmen found two children's skeletons under a staircase in the White Tower; Charles II had them buried at Westminster Abbey. Who was responsible, and whether those bones are the princes, remains unproven. The Bloody Tower, then called the Garden Tower, took its grim name from the story.

Read the full story

Edward IV died on 9 April 1483, at forty-one, unexpectedly. He left a twelve-year-old heir at Ludlow Castle on the Welsh border, a nine-year-old second son with his mother in London, and a brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, named on the king’s deathbed as Lord Protector.

What happened next happened fast. The new king, Edward V, set out for London with his mother’s brother, Earl Rivers. On 29 April Gloucester intercepted the party, dined with them, and by the next morning had Rivers under arrest. He rode into London with his nephew and lodged him in the Tower. That was not sinister in itself: kings traditionally stayed at the Tower before their coronation, and the royal apartments here were still in use. Then the younger boy, Richard, Duke of York, was fetched from sanctuary at Westminster Abbey to join his brother, “for his protection”.

The coronation was postponed. In June a sermon at St Paul’s Cross declared Edward IV’s marriage invalid and the boys illegitimate. On 26 June Gloucester accepted the crown as Richard III. Contemporaries noted the princes being seen less and less in the Tower’s gardens over the summer. Then nothing. They were never seen alive again.

What the Tower can and cannot show you

The tradition that the boys were kept in what is now called the Bloody Tower is old, and the name is a piece of evidence in itself. In their lifetime this was the Garden Tower, named for the Constable’s garden beside it. By the later sixteenth century it had acquired the name it has now, which tells you that within a few generations people at the Tower associated this building with the story.

The most concrete object is not here but at Westminster Abbey. In 1674, during demolition work at the foot of an external staircase of the White Tower, workmen found a wooden chest containing two children’s skeletons. Charles II accepted that they were the princes and had them placed in a marble urn in Henry VII’s Chapel. In 1933 the urn was opened and the bones examined; the anatomists reported two children of about ten and twelve. They have not been examined since, and requests for DNA analysis have not been granted.

Who did it?

The question has never been settled, and this site will not pretend otherwise. Richard III is the traditional culprit: the boys vanished on his watch, in his fortress, and he had just set them aside to take the throne. Two other names recur. Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, who had helped Richard to the crown and then rebelled against him that autumn, had access and ambition. Henry Tudor, who defeated Richard at Bosworth in 1485 and married the princes’ sister, would also have benefited from their disappearance, though he did not control the Tower until 1485.

The vivid version, with the two boys smothered in their beds by hired men and buried under a stair, comes from Sir Thomas More’s History of King Richard III, written around 1513, thirty years after the event, by a man who was five when it happened. More names the men and describes the deed with novelistic detail. His account shaped Shakespeare and every retelling since. It may rest on real testimony; it may not. We cannot check it.

What is certain is smaller and sadder: two children entered this fortress in the spring of 1483, and only the fortress knows what became of them.