Few historical figures have carried a worse reputation than Richard III. For more than five centuries, he's been cast as the villain of this entire story, the king who murdered his own nephews to secure a throne that wasn't rightfully his.
For a lot of people, the case has always felt settled: the princes disappeared, Richard became king, therefore Richard must be guilty. It's a clean, satisfying line of reasoning. History, as this series has shown at every turn, rarely stays that simple.
The Case, Briefly Revisited
The argument against Richard, covered in depth earlier in this series, still comes down to the same three things any modern investigator looks for: motive, means, and opportunity. He had all three. As long as either prince lived, his own claim to the throne remained genuinely vulnerable, and as king, he controlled every aspect of the Tower where the boys were last confirmed to be held. That combination is exactly why he's remained the leading suspect for more than five hundred years.
It's also worth remembering what's still missing after all that time: no signed order, no confession, no eyewitness account of an actual crime. Everything tying Richard to the boys' disappearance is circumstantial. That doesn't make him innocent. It does mean certainty has never actually been possible and a large share of his darkest reputation traces directly back to sources written after his death, several under the Tudor dynasty that replaced him and had obvious political reasons to make him look as bad as possible, then later immortalized by Shakespeare, who was writing drama, not history.
What Leicester Actually Revealed
In August 2012, archaeologists from the University of Leicester began digging beneath a city parking lot, searching for the long-lost site of Grey Friars, the friary where historical records suggested Richard III had been hastily buried after his death at Bosworth in 1485. Remarkably, they found a skeleton within hours of starting, one showing genuine scoliosis and clear battle trauma, both consistent with what was known of Richard's death.
The identification wasn't confirmed on circumstantial grounds alone. Researchers extracted mitochondrial DNA from the remains and compared it against two living descendants of Richard's sister, Anne of York - Michael Ibsen, a Canadian furniture maker nineteen generations removed, and a second relative, Wendy Duldig. In February 2013, the university announced a match with 99.999% statistical confidence. It's about as close to certainty as historical science gets.
What the skeleton actually showed complicated the popular image of Richard considerably. His scoliosis was real, but it was a genuine adolescent-onset spinal curve, not the exaggerated "hunchback" Shakespeare and later writers described - researchers confirmed it by noting the surrounding bone had grown asymmetrically to accommodate the curve over years, proof it developed naturally during his life rather than being invented after his death to make him look monstrous. His skeleton also showed eleven separate wounds, nine to the skull and two to the body, consistent with a violent death in close combat exactly matching historical accounts of how he died at Bosworth.
There's one more genuinely strange twist buried in the genetic results: follow-up analysis of the Y-chromosome, passed strictly father to son, found a break somewhere in the family's paternal line - evidence that at some point in the generations connecting Richard to his living relatives, someone's recorded father wasn't actually their biological one. It doesn't affect Richard's own identification, which rests on the maternal line instead, but it's a strange, very human footnote to a case that's ultimately all about royal bloodlines and who really had the right to a crown.
Weighing the Traditional Verdict Against the New Evidence
That brings this series to the genuinely difficult part. As covered in the previous chapter, Philippa Langley, the same researcher whose work led directly to finding Richard's grave in 2012 - has since spent years building an alternative case entirely, arguing through her Missing Princes Project that both boys may have actually survived well past 1483, quietly assuming the identities history remembers as "Lambert Simnel" and Perkin Warbeck, each mounting real, separate challenges to Henry VII's throne years later.
If that theory holds up under continued scrutiny, it would completely rewrite this case, shifting the responsibility for the princes' eventual deaths away from Richard III and onto Henry VII instead, years after the fact, once both young men had become direct political threats to Henry's own rule.
It's an extraordinary claim, and as this series noted earlier, it hasn't yet earned broad acceptance across the historical field, despite coming from a researcher with a genuinely remarkable track record. Most historians, weighing everything currently available, still lean toward the traditional reading: that the princes most likely died in 1483, that Richard remains the strongest single suspect given who controlled the Tower at the time, and that the newer survival theory, however intriguing, still needs far more independent verification before it can meaningfully unseat five centuries of accumulated scholarship.
So, Did Richard Kill the Princes?
After more than 500 years, and after everything this series has covered - the sources, the suspects, the bones, and now genuinely new archival research actively challenging the entire premise, the honest answer is still the least satisfying one: nobody actually knows.
Richard III remains the most likely suspect under the traditional reading of events. Likely, though, has never been the same thing as proven, and the newest research into this case means even the basic assumption that both boys died in 1483 is no longer as settled as it once seemed. The truth may have been lost centuries ago. It may never have been recorded in the first place. Or, as Langley's ongoing research suggests, it may still be sitting somewhere in an archive nobody has fully connected yet.
Final Verdict: What Most Likely Happened?
Weighing everything this series has covered, most historians still arrive at a cautious, traditional conclusion: the princes most likely died sometime in 1483, their deaths most likely benefited Richard III directly, and Richard remains, on balance, the strongest suspect this case has ever produced.
But probability has never equaled certainty here, and it likely never will. Nobody alive today can say with confidence exactly what happened inside the Tower of London that year and after this series, it's worth adding a genuine caveat that wasn't available to historians even a few years ago: the traditional story itself is now being seriously, credibly contested for the first time in five hundred years. That uncertainty, old and new combined, is exactly what keeps the Princes in the Tower one of history's most enduring unsolved mysteries.
Series Conclusion
You've reached the end of The Forgotten Files investigation into the Princes in the Tower mystery.
Series Articles
- The Royal Disappearance That Changed England
- The Last Sighting
- The Suspects
- The Bones Beneath the Tower
- Richard III: Villain, Victim, or the Most Likely Suspect?
Who do you believe was responsible for the disappearance of the princes? Richard III? Henry VII, years later? Or someone history has completely forgotten? Let us know in the comments.
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