By the autumn of 1483, Edward V and his younger brother Richard, Duke of York, had vanished from public view inside the Tower of London - a story covered in the first chapter of this series. What follows is where the trail actually leads once the boys themselves disappear from the historical record: into secondhand accounts, disputed bones, and one of history's most persistent impostor stories.
The core problem historians face is a simple one. Very few reliable, genuinely contemporary records survive from 1483 itself, and much of what people now think they "know" about this case was actually written years, sometimes decades, after the fact, often by people with a clear political stake in how the story got told.
Sir Thomas More's Famous Account
The single most influential version of this story came from Sir Thomas More, whose unfinished History of King Richard III, written roughly three decades after the events it describes, laid out a vivid, specific account of murder: the boys smothered in their beds on Richard III's orders, carried out by loyal agents acting on the king's direct instruction.
The story was enormously effective as narrative, and it went on to directly shape William Shakespeare's portrayal of Richard III as a scheming, murderous villain, an image that's arguably done more to define the king's public reputation than anything else written about him, before or since. For centuries, More's version was treated by many readers as simple historical fact.
There's a real problem with that, though. More was roughly five years old when these events actually took place, meaning his account is entirely secondhand, likely drawn from the household of Cardinal John Morton, a committed opponent of Richard III with every reason to shape the story unfavorably. That doesn't make More's account worthless, it remains one of the most detailed narratives to survive from the period, and it may well preserve genuine information passed down from people closer to events. But it can't be treated as proof, and modern historians generally read it as testimony filtered through decades of political motivation rather than an eyewitness record.
The Missing Bodies
One question has hung over this case from the very beginning: if the boys were murdered, where were the bodies?
For nearly two centuries, nobody had an answer. Then, in July 1674, workers carrying out renovations near a staircase leading to the White Tower's chapel uncovered a wooden chest buried roughly ten feet down, containing the skeletal remains of two children. The discovery caused an immediate sensation, and King Charles II, apparently convinced these were the long-sought remains of the princes, ordered them placed in an ornate urn, designed by the architect Sir Christopher Wren and installed in Westminster Abbey in 1678, where they remain today.
The urn's inscription doesn't hedge at all. Carved directly into the stone, it states plainly that the brothers were "stifled with pillows" on the order of their "perfidious uncle Richard the Usurper", essentially adopting Thomas More's account as settled fact, nearly two centuries before anyone had the tools to actually test it. It's worth sitting with that for a moment: one of the case's most frequently cited pieces of "evidence" is a royal monument that had already reached its verdict before any real examination took place.
Modern Investigations and Their Real Limits
The remains stayed sealed and largely untouched for another 250-plus years. In 1933, with permission granted by King George V, the urn was finally opened for scientific examination, carried out by Lawrence Tanner, Keeper of the Muniments at Westminster Abbey, alongside anatomist William Wright and dental specialist George Northcroft.
Their findings are frequently oversimplified in popular retellings. The examination did conclude the remains belonged to two children roughly the right ages, around 12 and 10, closely matching Edward and Richard's ages in 1483 and noted fragments of rag and velvet consistent with the correct period, since velvet wasn't in use in England before the fifteenth century. But Tanner himself was explicit, both at the time and later in his own writing, that the team deliberately avoided making any formal identification, describing their approach as "not proven" throughout. The sex of the remains was never conclusively determined at all, and without modern DNA analysis, unavailable in 1933, there was no way to confirm the remains were related to each other, let alone to the House of York specifically.
That's essentially where the physical evidence still stands today. No DNA testing, radiocarbon dating, or modern forensic examination of any kind has been conducted since 1933, not even after Richard III's own remains were dramatically identified beneath a Leicester car park in 2012, which reignited public and historical interest in finally testing the Westminster urn using the same modern techniques. According to reporting based on internal correspondence, the Church of England, backed by Queen Elizabeth II and government ministers, repeatedly declined requests to allow further examination throughout her reign. The official position hasn't changed since. The Richard III Society and other researchers continue to push for it, but as of now, one of the case's most important pieces of potential evidence remains deliberately unexamined.
Could the Princes Have Escaped?
Not every historian accepts that both boys died in the Tower at all. A minority position holds that one or both princes may have survived, and the fifteenth century itself produced several people who claimed, or were claimed by others, to be one of the missing boys.
The most famous was Perkin Warbeck, who emerged in the 1490s claiming to be Richard, Duke of York, somehow smuggled out of England as a child. His claim gained real traction, he was recognized and actively supported by Margaret of Burgundy, who happened to be Edward IV's own sister, and for a period he found backing among several European royal courts eager to destabilize Henry VII's still-shaky hold on the English throne. Warbeck was eventually captured, imprisoned, and executed in 1499 following a failed escape attempt. Most historians today consider him an impostor rather than the genuine Duke of York.
Even so, his story is a useful reminder that the fate of the princes was a live, unresolved question within living memory of the events themselves, not simply a puzzle later generations invented out of curiosity.
The Question Nobody Could Answer
What ties all of this together - More's secondhand account, an inscription that assumed guilt before any evidence existed, bones that have never been properly tested, and an impostor convincing enough to trouble two successive kings - is a single, stubborn fact: after 1483, there are no verified sightings of either prince, no authenticated letters, no reliable evidence either way about what actually happened to them. They simply vanish from the historical record.
When people disappear that completely, suspicion follows naturally, and one question comes to dominate every other: who actually stood to gain from their disappearance? Several names have been proposed over the centuries. Some are obvious. Others are genuinely surprising, and as later parts of this series will show, the case against the most obvious suspect is considerably less airtight than most popular accounts suggest.
Read the Full Princes in the Tower Series
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