The Princes in the Tower, Part 04: The Bones Beneath the Tower - Were the Missing Princes Finally Found?
For almost 200 years after the princes vanished, the mystery remained exactly that - a mystery, with theories multiplying and accusations flying between rival dynasties, but no physical evidence anyone could point to directly. Then, in 1674, workers renovating the Tower of London uncovered a wooden chest hidden beneath a staircase near the White Tower, containing the bones of two children.
The full story of that discovery - the urn Charles II commissioned, the inconclusive 1933 scientific examination, and the decades-long refusal to allow any modern DNA testing, was covered in detail earlier in this series. The short version worth repeating here: the remains have never been conclusively identified as belonging to Edward V and Richard, Duke of York. The connection is circumstantial, plausible, and completely unproven. No names, no identifying objects, and no records ever explained how the bones actually got there. To this day, nobody outside Westminster Abbey and the Church of England has been granted permission to test them using modern genetic techniques, not even after Richard III's own remains were definitively identified through DNA in 2012, which reopened public pressure to finally settle the question the same way.
That 2012 discovery, as it turns out, is where this part of the story actually gets interesting.
The Woman Who Found Richard III
The historian and researcher behind the 2012 identification of Richard III's remains - found, famously, beneath a car park in Leicester after a seven-year search, was Philippa Langley, whose work on that project fundamentally changed how seriously professional historians treat this entire period of English history. Rather than stopping there, Langley went on to launch a new, much larger research initiative in 2018: the Missing Princes Project, an international effort involving more than 300 researchers combing archives across seven countries for anything that might genuinely settle the fate of Edward V and his younger brother.
In November 2023, that project's findings were published in Langley's book The Princes in the Tower: Solving History's Greatest Cold Case, and presented to a wide UK audience through a Channel 4 documentary special, The Princes in the Tower: The New Evidence.
What the Missing Princes Project Actually Claims
The project's central, genuinely startling claim is that both princes survived well beyond 1483 and that two of the most famous "impostors" in English history, previously dismissed by most historians as pretenders, may actually have been exactly who they claimed to be.
According to Langley's research, Edward V may have survived under the identity later recorded by Tudor sources as "Lambert Simnel", a boy Henry VII's government publicly described as the son of a humble tradesman, but who led an actual armed challenge for the English throne at the Battle of Stoke in 1487. Richard, Duke of York, the project argues, may correspond to the man widely known as Perkin Warbeck, previously covered in this series as an alleged impostor who mounted his own separate challenge to Henry VII's throne throughout the 1490s before his execution in 1499.
The project claims to have located documentary evidence, proof-of-life records, in essence - placing the elder brother in 1487 and the younger in 1493, both consistent with the timeline this theory requires. If accurate, it would mean Henry VII, not Richard III, was responsible for finally ending both princes' lives, years after they'd disappeared from the Tower, once they'd each mounted genuine and dangerous challenges to his throne.
How Seriously Should This Be Taken?
Langley's track record matters here, she's the same researcher who found Richard III's actual grave against long odds, which buys her theory more credibility than most alternative claims in this case usually get. The Richard III Society, a long-established historical organization, has backed the project's findings publicly, and the research behind it draws on genuine archival work across multiple countries rather than speculation alone.
At the same time, it's worth being clear-eyed about where this theory currently stands: it's new, it directly contradicts the version of events accepted by most historians for the past five centuries, and it hasn't yet achieved anything close to broad scholarly consensus. Extraordinary claims like this one tend to face intense scrutiny from other historians before they're widely accepted, and that scrutiny is still very much ongoing as of this writing. Whether "Lambert Simnel" and "Perkin Warbeck" really were the missing princes, or whether the documentary evidence Langley's team found admits other explanations, remains a genuinely open and actively contested question within the field.
Evidence or Assumption?
If there's one lasting lesson from the bones, the urn, and now this new archival research, it's how easily assumption calcifies into accepted fact when a story goes unchallenged for long enough. For nearly 350 years, most people simply accepted that the 1674 remains belonged to the princes, largely because the alternative - genuine, permanent uncertainty - felt unsatisfying. The truth is that the physical evidence has never been definitive, and now, thanks to the Missing Princes Project, even the basic assumption that both boys died in 1483 at all is being seriously, credibly challenged for the first time in centuries.
The Mystery Remains
After more than five hundred years, historians still can't answer some of the most basic questions in this case with real confidence. Were the princes murdered at all, or did one or both survive? If they were killed, when, and by whose order - Richard III's, as the traditional account holds, or Henry VII's, years later, as the newest research argues? And have their actual remains already been found and quietly misidentified for centuries, or are they still out there somewhere, entirely undiscovered?
The bones beneath the Tower offer one possible answer. The Missing Princes Project offers a very different one. Neither provides the kind of certainty this mystery has always lacked.
In the final chapter of this series, we'll pull every thread of this investigation together, the sources, the suspects, the bones, and this newest research and ask the question the whole case ultimately comes down to: does Richard III actually deserve his five-century reputation as history's most infamous royal uncle?
Read the Full Princes in the Tower Series
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