What happened to the Princes in the Tower?

The boys, aged twelve and nine, were lodged in the Tower the summer their uncle took the crown. There is no record of either of them alive after it. Two children's skeletons dug up there in 1674 lie in Westminster Abbey as theirs. Nobody has proved whose they are, or who killed them.

Two boys and a crown

When King Edward IV died in April 1483, his elder son became King Edward V, aged twelve. His uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was to govern for him as Protector.

Richard lodged the young king in the royal rooms of the Tower, as was usual before a coronation. In June the boy's nine-year-old brother, also called Richard, joined him.

The coronation never came. Preachers and lords declared the boys' parents had never been lawfully married, so neither boy could inherit. On 6 July 1483 their uncle was crowned instead, as Richard III.

An Italian visitor that summer, Dominic Mancini, wrote that the boys were moved further inside the Tower. They were seen less and less "behind the bars and windows, till at length they ceased to appear altogether."

The bones under the stairs

About thirty years later, the writer Thomas More set down the account most people know. On Richard's orders, he wrote, two men smothered the boys in their beds and buried them at the foot of a staircase.

In 1674, workmen pulling down an old staircase against the White Tower found a wooden chest about 3 metres (10 feet) down. Inside were the bones of two children. King Charles II had them buried in Westminster Abbey, in a marble urn designed by Christopher Wren, the architect of St Paul's.

The urn's Latin inscription has no doubts at all. It blames their "perfidious uncle Richard the Usurper". When the urn was opened in 1933, an anatomist and a dentist found the bones of two children of about the right ages. The bones have never been DNA-tested.

Who killed the Princes in the Tower?

Richard III is the usual suspect. He controlled the Tower, and the boys were the obvious rivals for his crown. By January 1484 the Chancellor of France was telling a public assembly that Richard had murdered his nephews.

His defenders note that no confession was ever found, and that More wrote under the Tudors, who took the crown from Richard. Other suspects include Richard's ally the Duke of Buckingham and Henry VII, the first Tudor king.

In 2021 the historian Tim Thornton found that the sons of Miles Forest, one of the two men More named, served at Henry VIII's court, where More could have heard the story from them. In 2023 Philippa Langley, who led the search for Richard III's grave in Leicester, argued from European archives that both boys survived. Many historians are unconvinced.

Where to stand

Walk under the Bloody Tower from Water Lane and up the short slope. At the top, turn back to face its archway, with the lawn of Tower Green behind you. By the 1560s people called it the Bloody Tower, believing the princes had died inside.

The staircase where the bones were found stood against the south side of the White Tower, the big keep about 50 metres up the slope.

Hear it where it happened

The Trevlo tour of the Tower of London tells this story at the Bloody Tower. It also takes in Traitors' Gate, a bishop's escape, Anne Boleyn on Tower Green and the parson who stole the crown. Six stops, about fifteen minutes of listening, at your own pace.

The first stop is free to play on this page, and your first tour in the app is free.