The Princes in the Tower: England, 1483.

It is May, 1483. The Tower of London. Two boys are in the garden.

The older one is twelve. He has his father’s height already, and his father’s coloring, and for the last three weeks people have been bowing to him as if he were a king. Because he is a king. His name is Edward V, and he will be crowned in three weeks’ time, and everyone around him is busy with the preparations.

His brother is nine. Richard, Duke of York. He is not yet in the Tower. He is still with his mother, in sanctuary at Westminster, a mile and a half upriver.

But Edward is here. And in the evenings, according to the accounts that survive, he can be seen from the garden.

Playing. Moving through the light.

He will be seen there less and less as the summer goes on.

And then not at all.

The Princes in the Tower. You already know the name. You may already know the outline: two boys, one summer, no bodies. The case has been relitigated for five hundred years by historians, novelists, Shakespearean scholars, and amateur detectives who will not let the 15th century alone.

But I want to come at this differently. Because the question “who killed them” is, in a certain sense, the wrong question. Or at least, it’s not the most interesting one.

The more interesting question is this: how do you make two children disappear from a functioning royal palace, in a city full of witnesses, without anyone writing down what happened next?

The answer is not a single act of violence. It’s a process. It’s a sequence of institutional moves, each one defensible on its own, that together create a space in the record where two boys simply cease to exist.

That’s what this episode is about.

Not a murder mystery. A disappearance machine.

The year is 1483. The place is England, at the tail end of thirty years of intermittent civil war between two branches of the royal house. The Wars of the Roses, as they would later be called. And the particular horror of that world is that its violence was not random. It was systematic. Deposed kings did not retire. They died in custody under circumstances that were never fully explained.

Edward II, strangled or smothered at Berkeley Castle in 1327. Richard II, starved to death or simply starved at Pontefract in 1400. Henry VI, killed in the Tower on the night of Edward IV’s return to London in 1471. Officially, he died of pure displeasure and melancholy. That is what the record says. Everyone who heard it knew what it meant.

It was a pattern, and everyone in the political class understood it. You did not leave a deposed king alive. A deposed king was a flag. A rallying point. A name that rebels could march behind. You removed the name.

Edward V and his brother Richard knew this world. Their father had navigated it for twenty-two years. And in the spring of 1483, when their father died without warning, the machinery that had consumed so many other royal children turned, very quietly, to face them.

April 9, 1483. Edward IV is dead.

He is forty years old. He has been king for most of his adult life, and his death is sudden enough that no one is fully prepared for it. He leaves behind a twelve-year-old heir, a queen mother from a family that everyone at court despises, and a brother named Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who has just been named Lord Protector in the king’s will.

There are two power centers forming within days of the funeral: the Woodvilles, the queen’s family, who have controlled access to the young king during his childhood in Ludlow, and Richard of Gloucester, who has the legal title of protector but is, at this moment, in Yorkshire.

Both sides understand what is at stake. The king is a child. Whoever controls the child controls England.

Edward V is traveling from Ludlow toward London for his coronation. He is accompanied by his Woodville relatives, including his uncle Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers. It is a royal procession. It is meant to be a ceremonial passage.

On April 30th, it stops.

At Stony Stratford, a small market town in Northamptonshire, Richard of Gloucester and the Duke of Buckingham intercept the procession. Rivers and Richard Grey, the king’s half-brother, are arrested. The young king’s household is dismantled around him.

There is a reported exchange. The young king is said to have asked something to the effect of: why are his kinsmen being taken, why is he standing here without his own people, is he truly a king if he has no authority? The exact words are disputed. The sentiment is not.

He is twelve years old, and he has just learned what kind of king he is going to be.

Edward enters London on May 4th. He is housed in the Tower of London while preparations continue for the coronation, set for June 22nd. This is not unusual. The Tower is a royal palace. Kings have stayed there before coronations for centuries. It is expected.

But I want you to hold the physical space in your head for a moment, because it matters.

The Tower of London in 1483 is not the ruin tourists walk through today. It is a working complex of buildings inside concentric defensive walls, with the White Tower at its center. The White Tower has royal apartments. A queen’s chamber with decorated walls. A king’s chamber with a drain running directly to the Thames. There are staff. There are kitchens. There are guards at every gate.

Edward is put in the royal apartments. His attendants are with him, for now. He has his books. He has his household routines. From certain windows, you can see the river.

This is a palace. And it is also, by design, one of the most secure structures in England.

The line between residence and captivity depends entirely on whether you are permitted to leave.

Dominic Mancini, an Italian cleric who was in London that spring and observed events firsthand before leaving in July, writes about the atmosphere in the city. He is careful. He records what he sees and what he hears. And he notes that the men around the young king believe death is facing him.

His words:

“Like a victim prepared for sacrifice, sought remission of his sins by daily confession and penance, because he believed that death was facing him.”

That is not retrospective interpretation. That is written in the months it was happening, by a man who was there. A twelve-year-old king, in his rooms in the Tower, making his confession every day. Because he thinks he is going to die.

June 13th. A council meeting in the Tower of London.

William Hastings is there. Hastings is one of the most powerful men in England, a loyal friend to Edward IV for decades, a man who had fought beside the old king and helped restore him to the throne once already. He is not a Woodville ally. He supported Richard’s protectorate. He is, by all appearances, on Richard’s side.

He is dead by the end of the meeting.

Richard accuses him of treason mid-session. No trial. No formal charges. Hastings is taken out to the Tower green and beheaded on a log because there is not a block available. It happens that fast.

Mancini writes of the city’s reaction: the crowd did not know what had happened at first, only that there had been an uproar. Then the truth spread. And then came the fear. Because if Hastings, that Hastings, could be taken and killed like that, then no one in the political class was safe.

The point of the execution, understood immediately by everyone watching, is that the point of the execution is the execution. It is a signal. Step back.

June 16th.

The younger prince, Richard of Shrewsbury, is nine years old and still in sanctuary with his mother at Westminster Abbey. Sanctuary is a medieval institution with genuine legal weight. Elizabeth Woodville has taken her children there before, during previous crises, and it has held.

It does not hold now.

The Archbishop of Canterbury and other councillors come to the sanctuary. They bring assurances. They bring pressure. The argument is that the boy is needed for the coronation, that his brother requires company, that keeping a royal prince in sanctuary is itself a political statement the queen should not be making.

Elizabeth Woodville hands over her son.

We do not know what she said. We do not know what she was told, or believed, or feared. The record is silent on that conversation. What we have is the outcome: the boy crosses the river, enters the Tower, and is reunited with his brother.

And then both boys are inside.

June 22nd. The coronation date comes and goes. No coronation.

Instead, a petition circulates. Then a sermon. Then a formal claim, backed by a man named Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells. The claim: that Edward IV had been pre-contracted to marry a woman named Eleanor Butler before he married Elizabeth Woodville. Under canon law, if true, the marriage to Elizabeth was invalid. And if the marriage was invalid, then Edward V and his brother Richard were not legitimate heirs. They were bastards.

This claim was formalized into a statute called the Titulus Regius. Parliament endorsed it. And its language is exact and deliberate:

“All the issue and children of the said King Edward are bastards, and unable to inherit or claim anything by inheritance, by the law and custom of England.”

The coronation is not cancelled. The coronation happens on July 6th. But the king being crowned is not Edward V.

It is Richard III.

Look at the sequence. April: the king’s father dies, his household is dismantled, his loyalists are arrested. May: the king enters the Tower. June: the one man who might have resisted is killed without trial, the king’s brother is removed from sanctuary, the legal ground is cut from under both boys. July: the uncle is crowned.

Each step has a legal justification. Each step is presented as necessary. Each step is, on its own, arguably defensible. Together they form something else.

A corridor. Getting narrower.

And in the Tower, the attendants around the boys are changing. Their own servants are being replaced. Mancini writes:

“All the attendants who had waited upon the King were debarred access to him. He and his brother were withdrawn into the inner departments of the Tower proper, and day by day began to be seen more rarely behind the bars and windows, till at length they ceased to appear altogether.”

Day by day. More rarely. Till at length.

That is the horror. Not a single violent moment. A gradual subtraction.

Servants dismissed. Windows. Absences that accumulate. The Croyland Chronicle, a near-contemporary account written by someone in the royal council, records widespread rumor of the princes’ deaths circulating through the city and the court. Not confirmation. Rumor. The kind that starts when people who had been regularly visible simply stop being seen.

It spreads faster than the facts. It almost always does.

By late summer 1483, the boys are gone from public view. Not dead, not officially. Just not present. Not appearing. Not mentioned.

And then in October, something shifts.

A rebellion breaks out across southern England. The Duke of Buckingham, Richard’s closest ally, the man who rode with him to intercept Edward V at Stony Stratford, turns against him. The rebellion is not unified in its goals at first. But it consolidates around a name: Henry Tudor, the Lancastrian claimant in exile in Brittany.

The reason this matters for the princes is timing. For a rebellion to choose Henry Tudor, they need a reason not to choose Edward V. And the reason they are choosing Henry Tudor is that enough people in positions of power believe Edward V is already dead.

The boys have not been seen. The rumors have been running through the city all summer. And now the political class is acting on those rumors.

Which means, by October 1483 at the latest, the disappearance is doing political work. Someone is benefiting from the uncertainty. And in late medieval England, that is usually the person who arranged for the uncertainty.

So who did it.

I am going to give you the honest version of the answer, which is: we do not know. And the reason we do not know is partly because the people who might have known had very good reasons to make sure no one did.

But the shape of the evidence matters.

Richard III. The traditional answer. The one Shakespeare inherited and made famous.

The case for Richard is structural: he had custody. He had motive. He had just systematically eliminated every obstacle between himself and the throne. The boys were the most obvious remaining threat. And he never, not once, produced them publicly or offered any explanation of their fate.

That last point is genuinely strange. If the boys were alive, producing them would have silenced the rumors. If they had died of natural causes, announcing it with appropriate ceremony would have been the safe political move. Richard did neither. The silence is, in its way, the loudest thing in the record.

The case against him, or at least the case against certainty: the main narrative of the murder, the one involving a man named James Tyrrell, two servants named Miles Forest and John Dighton, and pillows pressed over the boys’ faces in their bedchamber, comes almost entirely from Thomas More. Writing in 1513. Thirty years after the events. From within the household of John Morton, who was Richard III’s enemy.

More is a brilliant writer. His account of Richard is literary and devastating and it has shaped how Western culture thinks about this case for five centuries. It may also be Tudor propaganda. It may be a mixture of things. But it is not an eyewitness account. It is a later reconstruction. And that matters.

Henry Stafford, the Duke of Buckingham.

This one is less well known, partly because Buckingham is executed in November 1483 and cannot object to the theory.

The case: Buckingham was effectively in command of London after Richard left for the north following his coronation. He had the access. He had a blood claim to the throne of his own, descending from both John of Gaunt and Thomas of Woodstock. Some historians, Paul Murray Kendall among them, have proposed that Buckingham acted entirely on his own, without Richard’s knowledge, either to clear the path for his own ambitions or to commit a deed so damaging to Richard’s reputation that it would create the conditions for rebellion.

And there are two contemporary documents that point at him directly.

One is a Portuguese text from the period, stating the princes were placed under Buckingham’s custody and, in that account, starved to death. The other is a document discovered in the College of Arms in 1980, stating the murder was, in its words, “be the vise of the Duke of Buckingham.”

Two documents. From different sources. Both pointing the same direction.

The counter-argument is this: if Buckingham had killed the princes without Richard’s knowledge, Richard had every reason, after the rebellion and Buckingham’s execution, to blame him publicly. It would have cleared Richard’s name. He did not do it. That silence is its own kind of evidence. It suggests either that Richard knew, or that Richard did not want the question raised at all.

Henry VII. This one requires the boys to have survived past 1483, which is uncertain but not impossible.

The argument: Henry takes the throne in August 1485, two years after the disappearance. If the boys were alive, they were the greatest threat to his legitimacy. He repeals the Titulus Regius, which technically re-legitimizes them. He orders every copy of the Titulus Regius to be destroyed, unread. And then in 1502, seventeen years later, a man named James Tyrrell confesses to the murders before his execution on unrelated treason charges. The confession, as reported by Thomas More, neatly assigns guilt to Richard III.

Henry never acknowledges the boys in any official record. He never explains what happened to them. The confession comes at a politically convenient moment, and no contemporary transcript of it survives.

The weakness of the Henry theory is that his enemies, and he had many, never accused him of this crime at the time. Researcher Philippa Langley and the Missing Princes Project have done archival work arguing for survival. A 2023 Channel 4 documentary presented what they interpret as a 1487 accounting receipt for weapons purchased on behalf of a son of Edward IV. It is intriguing. It falls short of proof.

There is a fourth name that comes up in the historiography, and it deserves a moment even if the evidence is thin.

Margaret Beaufort. Henry Tudor’s mother. A woman of extraordinary intelligence and ferocious political will, who in the summer of 1483 established a secret communication channel with Elizabeth Woodville through her physician, Lewis Caerleon, passing messages between them while Elizabeth sat in sanctuary.

The argument for Margaret’s involvement is this: she had motive, the princes’ existence blocked her son’s path to the throne. She had means, money, influence, and access to the court. She carried Queen Anne’s train at Richard III’s own coronation. And here is the detail that historians keep circling back to: for Elizabeth Woodville to agree to support Henry Tudor’s claim and to agree to a marriage between Henry and her daughter Elizabeth of York, she must have believed her sons were already gone. The person most likely to have told her that was the woman sending her messages through a doctor.

The argument against: there is no direct evidence. The Tower’s security around the boys, whatever else was happening, was real. And if Margaret had been responsible, Richard had reason to expose her and chose not to.

Historian Matt Lewis puts it clearly. She had motive, means, and opportunity. That makes her a suspect. Whether she acted on those things is a different question, and one the record does not answer.

And then there are the bones.

In 1674, workmen doing repairs at the Tower of London found a wooden box roughly ten feet beneath a staircase at the base of the White Tower. Inside: two small skeletons. Wrapped in what appeared to be fragments of velvet.

Charles II had them examined. The surgeon John Knight recorded that the bones appeared proportional to two children aged roughly thirteen and eleven. They were moved to Westminster Abbey, where they remain today.

In 1933, a team examined them. Their conclusion: the bones matched the ages of the princes. Their methodology has since been criticized on almost every available ground. Presumptive bias toward a conclusion. No sex determination. No modern forensic techniques. They wanted the bones to be the princes, and they found what they were looking for.

One additional problem: the specific staircase under which the bones were found did not exist in Richard III’s reign. It was built later. That does not prove the bones are not the princes. But it means the location does not match the account Thomas More provides, and it opens the question of whether the bones were moved at some point, or whether they belong to someone else entirely.

Modern DNA testing has been requested, petitioned, and proposed. The Church of England and the Crown have declined.

So the bones sit in Westminster Abbey. In an urn. And we cannot test them.

This is the case. Five hundred years on. That is where we are.

Here is something that should stop you cold.

The most important near-contemporary account of the princes’ disappearance, the work of a man named Dominic Mancini, who was physically present in London during the events of 1483 and who wrote about them while those events were still recent...

...was lost for four hundred and fifty years.

Mancini was an Italian cleric. He wrote his account in late 1483 or early 1484, in Latin, for a French patron. His manuscript went into a library somewhere and did not surface again until 1934, when a scholar named C.A.J. Armstrong found it in a French archive and translated it into English.

Four hundred and fifty years. In the interim, the historical record was shaped almost entirely by sources written later, written with political agendas, or written by people who were not present.

Here is a rough map of what we actually have.

Mancini: written in late 1483, before Tudor rule. An outsider. Present for the events. Not present for anything after July. His account stops at the coronation. He writes that the princes had been withdrawn and were rumored dead. He says explicitly: I could not discover what manner of death, or whether they were truly dead at all. That is honest. That is the limit of what he knows.

The Croyland Chronicle: written by someone who was almost certainly inside Edward IV’s council. It records the rumors, the fear in the city, the broad belief by late 1483 that the princes were dead. It does not name a killer. It does not describe a method.

The Great Chronicle of London and the Paston Letters: civic and private records that reflect the same thing. Rumor. Anxiety. Growing certainty, unconfirmed, that the boys are gone.

Philippe de Commines, a Flemish diplomat: states flatly, writing from the continent, that Richard had his nephews murdered in the Tower and usurped the crown. He is not neutral. He has his own allegiances. But he is recording what was believed across Europe within months of the events.

And then there is Thomas More. Writing thirty years later. The account everyone knows. The most detailed, the most vivid, the one with names and methods and a confession.

The Tyrrell confession is the sharp edge of this problem.

James Tyrrell was executed in 1502 for treason connected to Yorkist plots. According to Thomas More, writing more than a decade after the execution, Tyrrell confessed before he died to the murders of the princes, on Richard III’s orders, using Forest and Dighton.

No transcript of this confession survives. No contemporary account mentions it. The only record we have is More’s, written long after Tyrrell was dead and unable to confirm or deny anything.

The confession arrives at a precise moment: Henry VII’s throne is under strain, his heir has just died, and the Yorkist pretender problem has been a constant irritant for twenty years. Lambert Simnel in 1487, claiming to be Edward, Earl of Warwick. Perkin Warbeck in the 1490s, claiming to be Richard, Duke of York, the younger prince himself. Henry had both of them dealt with. But the problem kept reappearing because the archive had never definitively closed the case.

A clean confession from a dead man, pinning the crime on a dead king, closes several open questions at once.

Maybe Tyrrell confessed. Maybe he confessed to something that was then shaped in the retelling. Maybe the confession was constructed after the fact. We do not have the primary document. We have Thomas More’s account of Thomas More’s understanding of events that occurred before Thomas More was old enough to attend a council meeting.

The Mancini manuscript is the reminder: the archive is not the past. The archive is what survived. And what survived, survived for reasons. And those reasons are not neutral.

What Mancini gives us, the thing no Tudor source gives us, is the texture of fear in real time. Not the tidy narrative of a tyrant ordering murders. The slow withdrawal. The attendants dismissed. The windows. The faces seen less often. The city that began to hear rumors and did not know what to do with them.

That account was sitting in a French library for four and a half centuries while the story calcified around Thomas More’s version.

The historians I find most credible on this case are the ones who sit with that fact. The record is not a window into 1483. It is a series of lenses, ground by people who needed the light to fall a certain way.

Go back to the garden.

May, 1483. The boy is twelve years old. He is moving through the Tower’s outer grounds in the long English evening light. He has been king for three weeks. He will never be crowned.

By June he is inside the inner apartments. By late summer the windows are empty. By October, men are raising armies on the assumption that he is dead.

At no point does anyone write down what happened. At no point does anyone in power produce a body, or a document, or an announcement. The silence simply accumulates.

We found bones in 1674. We examined them in 1933. We will not test them now.

We have a confession from a dead man, reported by a writer who was a child at the time, preserved in an unfinished manuscript published after his death.

We have a Portuguese document and a College of Arms entry pointing at Buckingham. We have a contemporary Italian account that was missing for four hundred and fifty years. We have a statute that was passed to make two children legally cease to exist, and a later statute ordering every copy of the first one destroyed.

We have the silence, which is the most honest thing in the record. It tells you exactly how much the people who were there wanted you to know.

The question “who killed them” has occupied scholars and obsessives since before Shakespeare put it on the stage.

But the question I keep coming back to is different.

How long can a silence remain evidence?

Because the silence has lasted five hundred and forty years. And it is still working. It is still protecting something. Or a version of events that someone, at some point, needed to be the true one.

Two boys. A garden. An empty window.

That is what we have.

Next time, we go further back. And the crimes are stranger.

I’m A.M. Blackmere. Thank you for listening.