The Princes in the Tower: who erased them from history in 1483?

In the summer of 1483, twelve-year-old Edward V and his younger brother Richard were brought to the Tower of London while their uncle took the throne as Richard III. At first the boys were still seen playing in the garden; then the windows fell quiet and they disappeared from the record of the living. No body was ever confirmed, no sentence was passed, no order survives. That gap turned a succession crisis into a case that has lasted more than five centuries.

The Tower was then a fortress and a palace at once, and a future king staying there before his coronation did not in itself mean imprisonment. The turning point came when Edward IV's marriage was declared invalid, his children lost their right of succession and Richard was crowned on 6 July. From that moment the boys' existence was a political danger to any new regime.

What do the sources closest to 1483 say?

The Italian diplomat Dominic Mancini, who was in London, wrote that the boys were moved deeper inside and seen less and less often; he recorded the rumour that they had been done away with. Mancini did not witness any death and left England that year. The London chronicles give a last sighting, but the exact dates do not fully agree between sources.

Sir Thomas More wrote a detailed account of a smothering some three decades later, after the Tudors had defeated Richard. He names the men who carried it out, but he was not a witness and he reconstructs whole conversations. Shakespeare then turned Richard into a stage villain. A late source can preserve a genuine tradition and serve a political purpose at the same time.

Who had motive and opportunity?

Richard III benefited directly and controlled the Tower, which makes him the principal suspect. Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, held great power and later rebelled against Richard; he could have acted for the king or for his own ambition. Henry Tudor and Margaret Beaufort benefited later, but their opportunity to reach the boys in the summer of 1483 is much harder to demonstrate.

Motive is not proof of action. A sensitive order may never have been written down, or the document may be lost. On the other hand, Richard's failure to produce his nephews alive while the rumours spread told against him. That silence is deeply suspicious, yet it still does not identify the hand that acted.

The two skeletons of 1674

When a building near the White Tower was demolished, workmen found a wooden chest containing the bones of two young individuals near the foot of a staircase. Charles II had them reburied in Westminster Abbey as the princes. The location was said to resemble More's description, but the record of the discovery and its handling by seventeenth-century standards is very poor.

In 1933 the bones were re-examined and the estimated ages were reported as compatible, yet the methods of the time were limited and neither sex nor date could be established with confidence. Modern DNA and carbon analysis could help, but that requires permission to exhume, controls against mixed remains and suitable samples from relatives. Even with a correct identification, the bones may say nothing about who gave the order.

Could they have survived?

Perkin Warbeck later claimed to be Richard, and convinced several European courts as well as the boys' aunt Margaret of York. He failed, confessed to being an impostor and was executed. A confession can be extracted under pressure, but no independent chain of evidence links him to the child in the Tower.

The possibility that one or both were spirited away cannot be excluded by logic alone, yet a living prince was far too valuable a political instrument to vanish completely. Most historians conclude that they died, while the timing, the method and the responsibility remain disputed. The mystery lies not in the list of suspects but in the decisive piece of evidence that has never appeared.

From a story to a record that can be checked

A strong mystery does not require every detail to be unknown. The first task is to separate physical evidence, contemporary documents and measurements from illustrations, late recollections and literary retellings. A signal can be genuinely recorded without anyone knowing who sent it; a person can have really existed while the famous nickname was invented by a later generation.

Each kind of source answers a different kind of question. A receiver gives you frequency and timing, not intent. An inscription tells you a unit was stationed somewhere, not the fate of an entire army. A chronicle tells you which version was passed down, not that its author witnessed anything. Reading each source within its limits is what brings the unknown part into focus.

A gap in the record is not a blank slate

When the record is thin, a great many stories can be made to fit. But they are not equal: a hypothesis still has to match the last firm date, the geography, the technology available, the motives involved and whatever should have survived. A conclusion that needs fewer assumptions and explains more of the evidence deserves priority, even when absolute proof is out of reach.

"No evidence" also has to be given a scope. Nothing found in the archives that have been searched is not the same as never having existed; nothing detected again within one week is not the same as a source that never repeats. Stating that scope keeps you clear of both extremes: treating silence as proof of a cover-up, or treating a thin record as grounds for dismissing every account.

A timeline is the best defence against legend

Ordering the sources by date shows which details were there from the beginning and which were added decades later. A velvet mask turns to iron, a prime suspect turns into a stage monster, a technical signal turns into an apocalyptic message. A late detail is not automatically false, but it does have to explain how it came to know something the earliest sources never recorded.

It is also worth separating the date of the event, the date someone realised what it meant, and the date it was published. Data can sit unread for years before it is understood; an artefact can be excavated and then treated by the standards of its day. Those delays decide how much information modern techniques can still recover.

Independent confirmation comes in several forms

Two instruments running the same software can share the same fault; two chronicles can be copying one storyteller. Independence is strongest when different lines of evidence converge: a receiver far away, satellite imagery, an artefact with secure stratigraphy, a letter with an unbroken chain of custody. The fewer single links a conclusion rests on, the better it holds.

Reproduction matters just as much. A microwave oven that recreates perytons under stated conditions is causal evidence; a volcanic model that merely "could produce sound" is not enough for Upsweep unless it also reproduces the upward sweep and the seasonal rhythm. History rarely allows a rerun, so it has to cross-check texts, archaeology and probability instead.

Do not let an illustration become false evidence

There are no photographs of medieval events, and no direct images of many cosmic sources. The artwork in an article helps you picture the setting; it does not assert that a face, a gesture or a composition really looked that way. A caption should describe what the picture is explaining rather than present it as a scene from the site.

Images that travel beyond the article usually lose their caption. That is why illustrations should avoid invented text, over-confident symbols and sensational details with no source behind them. Atmosphere can come from light, empty space and traces; it does not need "evidence" planted in it that history never supplied.

A checklist for the reader

Ask what the earliest source is; whether its author was present; whether the raw data survives; whether an independent group confirmed it; when the famous detail first appears; what the hypothesis predicts; and what evidence would show it to be wrong. If nothing could refute it, it is a flexible story rather than an answer.

Finally, keep "cannot be ruled out" apart from "likely". Countless scenarios cannot be excluded absolutely, because the data is gone, yet history and science can still rank them. Talking in probabilities does not make an article duller; it tells the reader exactly where the solid ground ends.

The margin of error changes with the type of evidence

A recording can pin down frequency and timing quite precisely, yet still fail to identify the source if the sensor network is too sparse. A document can name a person and a place, but the author's intent, the intervening copies and the language of the period all introduce drift. Physical artefacts, which feel like the most objective evidence of all, can still be separated from their stratigraphy, over-restored, or dated from an object that happened to lie beside them. So it is a mistake to sweep every question mark into the single word "mystery". Each case needs its own map of uncertainty: what was measured directly, what was inferred, what a witness remembered, and what was only retold generations later.

When two pieces of evidence contradict each other, the sensible response is not to reach for the more dramatic one. You have to weigh resolution, the gap in time, the chain of custody, and whether the person recording it had an agenda of their own. A receiver in the right place can be worth more than ten people listening by ear; conversely, a clean stream of data with no context is just as easy to over-read. Being open about the level of uncertainty is what lets an account survive the next discovery. It also separates caution from evasion: a good researcher has to be able to say why one possibility is preferred over another, even when nothing can be settled for good.

A name can shape the whole story

Many famous phenomena are known through a catchy nickname. The nickname helps the public remember, but it also smuggles in an interpretation: "the trumpet", "the ghost", "the vanished legion" or "the man in the iron mask" all invite the mind to fill in pictures of its own. After a few hundred retellings, the label is easily mistaken for the original description. The remedy is to go back to the earliest wording, compare the translations and say plainly which name is modern. A single small difference - iron or velvet, vanished or redeployed, a one-off sound or a repeating train - can change the entire set of hypotheses.

The media adds a selection effect of its own: the coincidence is kept, while hundreds of ordinary occasions disappear from memory. Vivid details outlive dry numbers, so the later version tends to sound more complete and more frightening than the original record. That does not mean it is all imagination. It means the phenomenon and the history of the story about the phenomenon both need studying. Once you know where a detail first appeared, you can tell whether it is an independent fact, a new way of phrasing an old one, or decoration added to help the story travel.

What could move the case forward?

For acoustic or radio signals, progress usually comes from synchronised data at several stations, calibrated instruments and an environmental record alongside. Differences in arrival time give you a bearing; the spectrum and the repetition pattern help separate machinery, atmosphere, geology and astronomy. Raw data has to be archived so that another group can rerun the analysis instead of squinting at a processed plot. A single new detection need not solve an old mystery, but it can turn the vague question "what is it?" into specific tests of location, energy, periodicity and mechanism.

In history, progress can be slower: an archive is re-catalogued, private letters surface, organic material is dated, or isotopes reveal where somebody once lived. The technology is only useful when the question and the provenance of the sample are both clear. Testing an object with a broken custody history can produce a very precise number for the wrong subject. Conversely, a small administrative note placed correctly on the timeline can sometimes eliminate an entire major hypothesis. The value lies in connecting a new measurement to an old record, not in how modern the instrument looks.

Why is an answer sometimes still incomplete?

Some cases have a strong answer that still cannot be reconstructed minute by minute. We can identify a class of source, a social cause or a high-probability identity while the individual motives and the detailed sequence of actions are lost. Demanding that an answer cover every detail sets an impossible standard; but accepting a broad label without testing the exceptions is too easy. The balance is to grade the conclusion in layers: what is close to certain, what is well supported, what is still contested, and what there is simply no data to judge.

That unfinished quality is the honest part of research. A case can be closed on mechanism and still open on people, or the other way round. Once the main source is identified, the secondary questions do not become pointless: why did the community react as it did, why did the authorities of the day stay silent, and why does another version keep spreading? A mystery is therefore not only a hunt for a single answer. It is also a way of watching the limits of memory, of instruments, and of the power to keep records - the three things that decide which parts of the world survive for the people who come after.

The strangeness worth keeping

A natural explanation can be stranger than the legend: a dead star used as a clock, an oven in a staff kitchen imitating the cosmos, or a signal that crosses the entire Pacific. In history, what haunts is usually a deliberate silence - a name erased, an order never written down, people without power leaving none of their own words behind.

The best mysteries have clear edges. You know exactly what was recorded, what is merely plausible, and which measurement is still missing. The chill then comes not from exaggeration but from standing right at the edge of the record and seeing how much of the past, or of the universe, has moved out of reach.

References

• Historic Royal Palaces - Princes in the Tower
• Historic Royal Palaces - the discovery of the remains in 1674
• Tower of London - timeline and sources