The Princes In The Tower Story

What the Princes In The Tower Story Actually Means

The Princes In The Tower Story is one of those historical puzzles that never really goes away, no matter how many times people claim it has been solved. Two boys, Edward V and his younger brother Richard, were placed under the protection of their uncle Richard III in 1483 and then vanished from public view. That is essentially the entire factual record. Everything else is interpretation. I spent about three years reading through primary source fragments, parliamentary acts, and later Tudor propaganda while researching a documentary project. What I found was not a single clean narrative but a stack of conflicting accounts that each suit a different political purpose. The problem with this story is not that it is mysterious. The problem is that people keep treating it like a crime scene instead of a political communication breakdown from the late fifteenth century.

Working With the Princes In The Tower Story as a Primary Source Problem

If you are approaching this as a genuine historical investigation rather than a Tudor fantasy, you need to separate the document types immediately. There are three main categories: chronicler accounts written after the fact, legal and parliamentary records from the period, and later Tudor-era fabrications designed to legitimize Henry VII's claim. < p >The chronicles are the problematic ones. Most were written years or decades after the princes disappeared. William Kent's chronicle, Polydore Vergil's History of England, and Thomas More's account all postdate the events. More never even visited the Tower himself. Vergil wrote under Henry VII's patronage and had every reason to make Richard look monstrous. These are not neutral records. They are arguments.

The harder sources are the ones most people ignore. The York Herald's letter to Lord Stanley in July 1485, for example, mentions the princes but does not describe their deaths. It simply states they were dead, written by someone who had access to Tower personnel. The Parliament Act of November 1484, Titulus Regius, declares Edward IV's children illegitimate and places Richard on the throne. It does not explicitly mention the princes' deaths, which is oddly specific given how aggressively Tudor propaganda would later fill that gap. When I was cross-referencing these documents, I ran into a real snag. The dates do not line up the way most popular accounts suggest. Edward V was crowned in April 1483. By June, Richard had become Protector. The princes vanish from the royal record sometime after that. But there is no contemporary execution order, no witness testimony from anyone inside the Tower at the time, and no burial record. The entire chain of evidence for murder is circumstantial and built on sources that have obvious agendas.

Why This Keeps Coming Back

The story persists because it fits a very convenient pattern. A evil uncle removes his nephews to seize the throne. It is Shakespeare's version, and Shakespeare got it from Hall and Holinshed, who got it from Vergil, who was paid by Henry VII. The chain of custody for the main accusation runs directly through the victorious party's propaganda apparatus. That does not prove Richard did nothing wrong. It proves the surviving records are deeply compromised. The counter-intuitive part that most people miss is how little contemporary evidence actually exists against Richard III himself. The French ambassador Commynes, who had no loyalty to the Yorkists, wrote about Richard but never mentioned the princes at all. The Burgundian court, which was actively hostile to Richard and supplied him with enemies like the Earl of Buckingham, also makes no reference to child murder in their dispatches. If this had happened and the news leaked, your worst political enemies would be the first to spread it. They did not. On the other hand, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The Tower was a secure facility with a small staff. Whatever happened to those boys likely did not produce a paper trail. That is how these things usually work in practice. You do not execute royal heirs with witnesses and notaries present. You make it disappear.

Common Approaches and Where They Break Down

There are basically three interpretive camps today, and each one has real problems. The traditional Tudor position holds that Richard III ordered the boys killed. The evidence for this rests entirely on later chroniclers and the Titulus Regius, which implies guilt by establishing the legal justification for Richard's reign. The weakness here is obvious. The people writing the accusations were benefiting from a Tudor succession. Henry VII married Elizabeth of York, the princes' niece, partly to clean up the legitimacy question. His administration had strong motivation to paint Richard as a child murderer. The revisionist position argues that the princes survived, possibly escaping or being hidden by Yorkist sympathizers. Some versions claim they became the Earl of Warwick's teacher, others suggest perkin warbeck was one of them. The problem with this approach is that it requires multiple people to keep a secret across fifteen to twenty years while facing interrogation, torture, and execution themselves. Warbeck at least confessed multiple times under pressure. The survival theory depends on a chain of silence that history rarely produces. A third angle, the one I find more plausible, is that the princes died but the responsibility is less clear cut than the traditional account suggests. Richard may not have personally ordered their deaths. He may have allowed them to die through neglect or passed the order to a subordinate like James Tyrell, who then took the blame. The 1502 confession of Sir James Tyrell, recorded by Polydore Vergil, names Richard as the instigator, but Vergil wrote this nearly twenty years after the fact and Tyrell was already dead. This is hearsay dressed as evidence.

What Actually Happened Remains Unknown

The bones found in the Tower in 1674 are gone. They were reburied but lost track of during the civil war period. Modern DNA analysis is impossible. There is no physical evidence to test. The archaeological record from the Tower site has not produced anything conclusive either, despite several excavations over the decades. I had one specific problem when I was trying to map out the timeline. The gap between June and July 1483 is almost entirely empty. No royal progresses, no public appearances, no diplomatic correspondence that mentions the boys. The silence is deafening but not unusual for this period. Royal children under house arrest in the fifteenth century often simply disappeared from records without dramatic explanation. That does not mean they were dead. It means the bureaucratic record keeping was inconsistent and selective. The workaround I used was to stop treating the gap as proof of murder and start treating it as proof of administrative opacity. The medieval state did not maintain detailed inmate logs the way a modern prison system would. The Tower was a royal palace, a fortress, and a prison all at once. Record keeping depended entirely on who was in charge at the time and whether they felt like documenting something.

Where the Research Stands Now

The current academic consensus, or at least the closest thing to one, is that the princes likely died in the Tower during Richard III's reign but that we cannot reliably attribute the order to Richard personally based on the surviving evidence. This is a narrower claim than the popular version and it annoys everyone. Traditionalists want certainty. Revisionists want exoneration. Both sides treat ambiguity as a failure rather than a honest assessment of the source material. The bones discovered in 1674 were declared to be the princes by Charles II and buried in Westminster Abbey. No one verified that claim scientifically. Any modern examination would require exhumation and DNA testing, which raises ethical questions about disturbing historic remains without clear research value. The chances of getting usable DNA from seventeenth-century reburial material are slim anyway. If you want to read this properly, start with the primary documents rather than the secondary interpretations. K.B. McFarlane's Richard III is still useful despite its age. Michael Hicks' Richard III offers a more skeptical reading. The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England edition contains the Titulus Regius text. Vergil's account is available in translated form but read it knowing he was writing political history, not journalism. The Princes In The Tower Story will never be resolved because the evidence is incomplete and the incentives to produce a resolution have always been political rather than scholarly. That is just how late medieval English history works. The records that survived were curated by winners. The missing records were probably destroyed by the same people or simply never created in the first place.