Moments in Time

The Princes in the Tower

What really happened to the two young princes within the forbidding walls of the Tower of London?. Was it their uncle, Richard of Gloucester or the Lancastrian Henry Tudor who ordered their deaths?.

Prince Edward was born at Westminster on the 2nd of November 1470, where his mother ,Elizabeth Woodville was in sanctuary taking refuge from her Lancastrian rivals during the turbulent years of her husband's bid to take the throne from the weak Henry V1.

The young prince spent much of his early life under the care of his mother's Woodville clan who had established themselves in many offices of power under the usurper King Edward 1V. At the tender age of three, the young prince was appointed President of the Welsh Council and he was formally ensconced in his official residence in Ludlow, together with his uncle, Anthony Woodville, his half brother Richard Grey, Earl Rivers, Sir John Scott and Sir John Fogg, all Woodvilles or closely related to them. These nobles were not only appointed to the Council, but also to his household;d. Contemporaries refer to "a wall of Woodvilles" surrounding the prince. Thomas More wrote of the arrangement at the time noted, "everyone as he was nearest kin to the Queen, so was planted next unto the prince".

It was at Ludlow on the 4th of April 1483, that the prince learned of his father's death five days earlier and arrangements were made for him to return to London, with his Woodville guardians staying close to him and swiftly announcing the date of his coronation as May the 4th.

His uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester,had been a loyal and constant supporter of the dead king and claimed that he had been appointed Protector in Edward's will. On learning of the king's death, he immediately ordered a priest  to say a requiem mass, before riding with a retinue of knights to York, where he arranged a solemn funeral service for Edward, demanding that all nobility swear an oath of fealty to the new king, he himself being the first to take the oath.

He then rode with a large force to intercept the prince's j journey to London at Northampton on the 29th of April and escort them to London. The two groups rode on to Stoney Stratford where, despite the prince's protests, Richard had Earl Rivers, Richard Grey and the prince's chamberlain Thomas Vaughn arrested, stating that he had uncovered a plot against himself "and the old nobility of the realm".  The arrested men were taken to Richard's power base in the north and were later executed.

Richard brought the prince to London and lodged him in the Tower of London, which was at that time, both a royal residence and a prison Rumours began to circulate that Gloucester sought to take the throne, but he calmed the situation by claiming that he was  foiling a Woodville plot.

Word had reached Elizabeth Woodville  that the prince was in Richard's hands and, much agitated, she fled to sanctuary in Westminster Abbey with her daughters, her younger son Richard of York, plus a substantial part of the royal treasure. The business of government continued in the name of the Prince Edward V until June the 8th when Gloucester 's issues of writs in the king's name stopped. The coronation was postponed from the 22nd of June to the 9th of November.

On the 22nd of June, Bishop Stillington of Bath announced to the Council that the dead Edward 1V's claim to the throne was unlawful. Within days sermons were being preached in London alledging that Edward was not a true king on account of his being born illegitimate. Further, his sons could not inherit the throne because they too were bastards. The sermons claimed that the old king's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was invalid due to his having previously married one Elizabeth Lucy, who was known to have been one of Edward's many mistresses and had borne him a son although no record exists of their marriage.

A further claim was mad that he had precontracted a marriage to an Elizabeth Butler, daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury. If a precontract had in fact taken place, then in law, his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville would indeed have been unlawful, thus making his offspring illegitimate and Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the true heir to the throne.

Shortly thereafter, the young Richard, Duke of York, was taken from sanctuary on Gloucester's orders on the pretext that "his brother required his company" and both children were lodged in the tower.  The two boys were seen on occasion playing on the tower green, but these sightings became less frequent until they ceased completely.

Many theories have been put forward to explain their fate. Wrer they murdered and, if do, by whom?. History tends to favour Richard of Gloucester as the culprit. His friend and ally, the Duke of Buckingham, as Constable of England, had access to the tower and could have arranged the murders on Richard's orders to remove these last obstacles to his own claim to the throne,

Richard, according to Sir Thomas More, had reputedly sent one of his men, a certain John Green,with a letter to the Constanle of the Tower, Sir Robert Brackenbury, exhorting him to kill the princes, which would seem a rather foolhardy thing to do. Another suspect could have been John Howard, later to become Duke of Norfolk. He was, quite unusually, given custody of the Tower on the night of the murders. It was also known that another of Richard's retainers, a certain James Tyrell, was sent by the Duke to Sir Robert Brackenbury with a demand for the keys of the fortress to be handed over for one night.

Sir Thomas More, quoting from contemporary sources, states that the princes were smothered by pillows in their beds by James Tyrell, John Dighton "a big,broad,square knave" and Miles Forrrest,"A fellow fleshed in murder before time". It is known that Tyrell was later appointed Masster of the King's Henchmen,perhaps as a reward for his services. Interestingly,in the year after the Battle of Bosworth, the Lancastrian contender Henry Tudor issued two pardons in the name of James Tyrell. Doers this suggest that Henry Tudor could also have been a suspect?. He stood just as much from the deaths of the princes as Duke Richard. Further, in 1487, Henry Tudor quarrelled with the Dowager Queen Elizabeth Woodville, forfeited all her possessions and banished her to a nunnery. Could this be due to her having discovered his part in the murder of her children?. Tyrell himself is said to have confessed to the murders in 1502 , when he himself was under sentence of death for treason. This evidence and confession was however, gained under torture and must therefore be suspect.

Why then would Richard of Gloucester need to murder the princes?. Having had them declared illegitimate they no longer stood in his way. We also know that much disinformation regarding Richard was spread by his successor Henry Tudor in an effort to strengthen his own claim to the throne.

Another theory is that the princes were spirited abroad. It is known that their mother left sanctuary at Westminster with her other children and came to Richard. Would she have done this if she believed that he had killed her two sons?. The Augustine Friar Dominic Mancini, wrote the following in 1483, "He and his brother were drawn to the inner apartments of the Tower and day by day began to be seen more rarely behind the bars and windows, till at length they ceased to appear altogether". A Strasbourg doctor, the last of the young Prince Edward's attendants whose services whose company the prince enjoyed, reported that the young king, like a victim prepared for sacrifice, "sought remission of his sins by daily confession and penance because he believed that death was facing him.. Already there was a suspicion that he had been done away with. Whether he was done away with and in what manner of death I have, so far, not discovered".

Robert Rical, Recorder of Bristol, wrote in his Kalender of September 1483, "In this year the two sons of King Edward were put to silence in the Tower of London".

A historical note by a London citizen, writing in 1483, notes they "were put to death in the Tower of London"

In 1674, some workmen demolishing a staircase within the Tower, discovered a teak chest containing the bones of two children of about thirteen and eleven years old. The matter was brought to the attention of King Charles 11, who asked Sir Christopher Wren to design a marble container in which the bones were placed and reverently sited in the Henry V11 chapel in Westminster where they lay to this day.

Controversy continues to haunt the royal remains and many books have been written on the subject. Perhaps the best chance of proving once and for all that the bones discovered in the Tower are indeed those of the two princes could  be found in the work of John Ashdown-Hill, a historian of the period. His work on helping to confirm the identity of the skeleton found in a Leicester car park as that of King Richard !11, using modern DNA techniques would make it possible for Richard's DNA to be compared to the DNA of the princes who were his nephews.  It is hoped that permission will one day be granted to allow access to the prince's bones in Westminster Abbey and confirm a familial match.