Brand Engagement Director Brianna is here today to walk us through one of history’s most notable cold cases. [Content warning for mentions of violence and child death.]

English history fans, it has been a VERY interesting month. Philippa Langley, the researcher behind the eventual discovery and exhumation of Richard III’s remains, has released a new book — this time on Richard III’s assumed murder victims, the Princes in the Tower.

For those of you with little to no knowledge of medieval British drama, here’s what we know and what we have believed for over five centuries:

These young boys — Edward V and Richard, Duke of York — were the only surviving male heirs of Edward IV upon his death. Edward V was to be crowned, but his uncle Richard took possession of the boys, declared them bastards, and was crowned king as the eldest surviving brother of Edward IV. He placed the boys in the Tower of London, at which point they seem to have disappeared. The story told throughout history is that they were murdered on Richard III’s orders.

Richard III’s reign continued for roughly two years before the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, when Henry Tudor came to claim the throne. Henry was a very, very removed descendant of the Lancastrian side of the War of the Roses (in which the York and Lancaster sides of the House of Plantagenet fought for the crown; Edward IV was a York) and there were over a dozen other potential heirs with a stronger claim. But Henry won the battle against Richard III and thus earned the crown by conquest, ascending as Henry VII and marrying Elizabeth of York, the eldest sister of the Princes in the Tower. This was the agreement to unite the two sides of the war.

Henry VII spent significant time fighting off rebellion during his reign, and his son and heir Henry VIII also dealt with Yorkists conspiring to take the throne (although he was less paranoid — a phrase I never expected to write about Henry VIII — about the York threat than his father). All potential claimants were deceased by the ascension of Elizabeth I. Nevertheless, the fear and insecurity about their fragile claim to the throne colored every Tudor monarch in some way.

Most significantly, there were two Yorkist rebellions during Henry VII’s reign that centered on so-called “pretenders” claiming to be one of the two princes. The first was Lambert Simnel, who some believed to be Edward Plantagenet, 17th Earl of Warwick (the nephew of Edward IV) or Richard, Duke of York. Simnel was defeated at the Battle of Stoke Field. Interestingly, Langley’s research has led her to believe he was actually Edward V.

The second was Perkin Warbeck, who was believed to be Richard, Duke of York — and Langley’s research supports this idea. She notes the known birthmarks of Richard, two of which were on his face, and multiple eyewitness accounts of Perkin having these same marks exist. However, Perkin was eventually captured and after several failed escape attempts, he was made to read a confession that he was a pretender, executed, and buried in an unmarked grave. Notably, Langley points out that by the time of his execution he was badly beaten to the point of being unrecognizable, which could have been done to hide these features.

So the question that has carried all this time is: Did the boys die in the Tower on Richard III’s orders, or did they manage to escape — and potentially returned to reclaim the throne, only to fail? Over a century later, we seemed to get an answer to the princes’ fates: The bones of two small children around the boys’ ages were found beneath the staircase of the White Tower of the Tower of London in 1674. They were buried at Westminster Abbey under this assumption. However, this theory was never fully confirmed once DNA testing became available, and Elizabeth II was very against exhuming the bones, preferring to leave them to rest. Charles III, in contrast, has previously expressed willingness to exhume and test the bones.

In Elizabeth II’s defense, there was no credible evidence contradicting the belief that the bones belonged to the princes. But new evidence supplied by Langley’s book (and the continuing research of her team past its publication) may change that: There is evidence suggesting the boys were broken out of the tower, and then separated. Edward V appears to have spent a large amount of time in the northern country, the Channel Island, and Ireland. Richard, Duke of York was sent abroad with Yorkist/Ricardian retainers. The implication, then, is that the supposed “pretenders” of Edward V and Richard, Duke of York were actually them.

All that we would learn from testing the bones in Westminster Abbey is whether or not they belonged to the princes. We’d still be left with the question, “what happened to them?” I could not reliably find out where Lambert Simnel may have been buried, and I imagine finding his remains, as well as the unmarked grave of Perkin Warbeck, are high on Langley’s list. But even if all that was proven is that the princes were not buried under the stairs, it is still quite a huge shift in our paradigm for them to have survived their uncle. For historians and history buffs, it can be quite emotional if your conclusion is that Richard III is responsible (I’ve always oscillated between what I believe because we haven’t had enough evidence in any direction, and I am firmly in the camp of “test the bones”).

If your gut reaction is “of course Richard III killed them,” I would offer not only that the prevailing assumption was that Richard III was thrown into the River Soar after the Battle of Bosworth until he was found under the car park in 2012, but also this quote from Langley toward the end of her interview with the podcast “Gone Medieval,” which is worth a listen: “Evidence-based research enables people to have an informed opinion. And if you have an opinion that goes against the evidence, I think just ask yourself ‘why’ and have a think about that.” If you’re not a podcast listener or a book reader, you can also watch a recent documentary detailing the research.
If nothing else, the most wild thing for me is that Philippa Gregory may have been at least partially right [content warning for violence].