Two Princes Vanished in the Tower. The Documents Nobody Talks About | Edward V & Richard of York

In the summer of 1483, a twelve-year-old king and his nine-year-old brother were seen playing in the garden of the Tower of London. Then they vanished. Their uncle became King Richard III, and for five centuries most people have believed he had them killed. But in 2023, a research project presented documents from archives in Lille and Gelderland which, it argues, show that the princes may have survived. Historians are far from convinced. This is the story of the Princes in the Tower: Edward V and Richard, Duke of York, Richard III's seizure of the throne, Thomas More's account of the murder, the bones found in 1674 and examined in 1933, the pretender Perkin Warbeck, and Philippa Langley's Missing Princes Project, with the arguments of its critics. In this case file: • How Richard of Gloucester took the throne in 1483 • The last reports of the boys inside the Tower • Thomas More's account: Tyrell, Forrest and Dighton • The 1674 bones and the 1933 examination of the urn in Westminster Abbey • Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck: impostors, or the lost princes? • The Lille receipt and the Gelderland document, and why historians dispute them • Our evidence scorecard for the three main theories (our own reading, not a verdict). Vote in the comments! 🗝️ Mysterium Archive opens the files history never managed to close. A new case every weekday. Sources: Dominic Mancini, "The Usurpation of Richard III" (1483; ed. C.A.J. Armstrong); The Crowland Chronicle Continuations; Thomas More, "The History of King Richard III" (c. 1513); L.E. Tanner & W. Wright, "Recent Investigations Regarding the Fate of the Princes in the Tower", Archaeologia 84 (1935), pp. 1–26; Philippa Langley, "The Princes in the Tower: Solving History's Greatest Cold Case" (The History Press, 2023); Michael Hicks, "Historic doubts about the survival of the Princes in the Tower after 1485", Historical Research 97 (2024), pp. 437–442; Tim Thornton, "More on a Murder: The Deaths of the 'Princes in the Tower', and Historiographical Implications for the Regimes of Henry VII and Henry VIII", History 106 (2021); A.J. Pollard, "Richard III and the Princes in the Tower" (1991). Images: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (Paul Delaroche, John Everett Millais, James Northcote, William Hogarth, Hans Holbein the Younger, Philip James de Loutherbourg, Edward Matthew Ward, Bernhard Strigel, National Portrait Gallery, British Library, Canterbury Cathedral). Engravings by Jacobus Houbraken, James Sargant Storer and an anonymous artist, Yale Center for British Art (CC0). "Henry VII's chapel, Westminster Abbey" by Philip Pankhurst (CC BY-SA 2.0). Music: original score. #PrincesInTheTower #RichardIII #UnsolvedMysteries #HistoryMystery