Two Boys Went Into the Tower. One Sighting Is the Last Anyone Has.

What We Know

Edward V was twelve years old and had never been crowned. His father, Edward IV, died on April 9, 1483, and within six weeks the boy was lodged in the Tower of London, then a working royal palace as much as a fortress, to await his coronation. On June 16, his nine-year-old brother, Richard, Duke of York, joined him there. Their mother, Elizabeth Woodville, had taken the younger boy into sanctuary at Westminster Abbey after their father’s death; she gave him up only after the Abbey was surrounded by their uncle’s troops and the Archbishop of Canterbury personally promised to protect him.

That uncle was Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the boys’ Lord Protector. Within weeks, an assembly of lords and commons declared their parents’ marriage invalid and the boys illegitimate, clearing Richard’s own path to the crown. He was crowned Richard III on July 6. The Great Chronicle of London records the brothers “shooting and playing in the garden of the Tower” sundry times, the last sighting of them anyone left any specific record of. An Italian friar named Dominic Mancini, in London at the time, later wrote that the boys were withdrawn to the Tower’s inner rooms and “began to be seen more rarely behind the bars and windows, till at length they ceased to appear altogether.” He left England before July 9 without learning what happened to them. Nobody who saw them after that summer left a record saying so.

In October, Richard’s own ally Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, rebelled against him for reasons no historian has ever fully explained, and was executed within weeks. Two years later, Richard died at Bosworth Field and Henry Tudor took the throne as Henry VII, marrying the boys’ sister to bind the rival claims together. In 1674, workmen demolishing a staircase near the White Tower dug up a chest of children’s bones. Charles II had them moved to Westminster Abbey, where they’ve stayed ever since, sealed in a marble urn.

The Roadblock

Nearly everything anyone has ever claimed to know about what happened to Edward and Richard comes from someone with a stake in the answer. Mancini admits his own account is built on rumor he picked up secondhand, not on anything he witnessed himself. Thomas More’s version is the one with a named murderer, a pillow, and a staircase. It was written some thirty years later by a man whose own father served the Tudor regime that replaced Richard’s. No trial record, deposition, or independent document confirming any confession has ever surfaced. When the 1674 bones were finally examined in 1933, the two Westminster Abbey investigators could not determine the children’s sex, their exact ages, or how long they’d been dead; they explicitly declined to identify the remains, even as the presumption that they were the princes shaped how everyone else read the report afterward. The one test that could actually distinguish between the competing accounts, matching DNA from those bones against a documented living relative, has been possible since 2018. It has never been permitted.

Best Guesses

Richard III ordered the killings

The strongest version of this case, Thomas More’s detailed account of Sir James Tyrell smothering the boys on Richard’s orders, was written a generation later by a Tudor-aligned author, and no independent record of any confession by Tyrell survives. Richard, notably, never accused any predecessor or rival of the crime either, when doing so would have served him. But he had just taken a throne from these two boys by declaring them illegitimate, and a living, undeposed Edward V was a permanent claim against him. The sightings stop within weeks of his coronation — exactly when the political need for them to disappear was sharpest.

Buckingham exceeded his orders

A contemporary Portuguese document names Buckingham, not Richard directly, as the boys’ custodian that summer. He had his own strong claim to the throne, and his abrupt, badly-explained rebellion against Richard that October fits the shape of a man who broke with his king over something drastic. But the Portuguese account is a single foreign report, uncorroborated by any English source, and nobody has ever placed Buckingham physically inside the Tower at the relevant moment. It also leaves unexplained why Richard, if genuinely innocent, let the accusation attach to his own reign rather than to the ally he’d just executed.

Henry VII killed them after 1485

If Henry had found the boys already dead when he took the throne, he had every incentive to produce proof that Richard’s regime had killed them and use it as propaganda against a rival who could no longer object. He never did — no such document survives from his reign. But once he married the boys’ sister to unite the rival claims, a surviving Edward V, restored to legitimacy the moment Titulus Regius was repealed in 1486, outranked him outright. He had motive, resources, and, unlike Richard, two extra years in which to act.

One or both princes survived

For six years, a young man backed by Margaret of Burgundy, the real Richard’s own aunt, was received at European courts as the surviving Duke of York, and Philippa Langley’s decade-long Missing Princes Project argues newly surfaced archival records support exactly that outcome. But that pretender, Perkin Warbeck, confessed under Henry VII to being a Flemish boatman’s son before his 1499 execution, and named historians have directly challenged Langley’s core evidence, arguing the payment records she reads as referring to Edward V more plausibly describe Richard III’s own illegitimate son.

The Verdict

The test that could settle this already exists. A historian traced an unbroken maternal line from the princes’ aunt down to a living woman, an opera singer, and in 2018 identified the mitochondrial DNA sequence the Westminster Abbey bones would need to match. He died two months before the university published the result — the test still unrun. The Dean who most recently declined a request cited a real limit: radiocarbon dating this old carries a margin of roughly fifty years, too wide to separate 1483 from 1485. But DNA answers a different question — a match wouldn’t fix the date, but it would settle, for the first time in five centuries, whether those bones are the princes’ at all. Nobody has been allowed to find out.

The will from inside the Tyrell family, the archive Langley reads as proof of survival, the pillow story with no surviving confession — all of it sits downstream of that one unresolved fact. The urn stays sealed.