The Princes in the Tower

England, 1483. Edward IV is dead, and the apparently secure Yorkist dynasty begins to collapse.

His twelve-year-old son succeeds him as Edward V and prepares to travel from Ludlow to London for his coronation. Before he reaches the capital, his uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester, intercepts the royal party at Stony Stratford. The young king's Woodville relatives are arrested and Edward enters London under Gloucester's control.

Soon his younger brother, Richard, Duke of York, is removed from sanctuary at Westminster and joins him in the Tower of London.

The coronation never takes place.

Within weeks, Edward IV's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville is declared invalid, their children are pronounced illegitimate and Gloucester accepts the Crown as Richard III. As the summer advances, the princes are seen less frequently until they disappear from public view.

No surviving document records an order for their deaths. No reliable eyewitness describes their murder. No securely identified grave provides a final answer.

Yet Richard controlled the boys, benefited from their disappearance and failed to produce them when rumours of murder threatened his regime.

Were Edward V and his brother killed on Richard's orders? Did another powerful figure act independently? Could either prince have survived? What weight should be given to Sir Thomas More, the bones discovered beneath a staircase in the Tower and the later pretenders who claimed Yorkist identity?

The Princes in the Tower reconstructs the extraordinary political revolution of 1483 before examining the evidence behind England's greatest royal mystery. It separates documented events from contemporary rumour, Tudor accusation, later legend and modern survival theories without claiming certainty where none exists.

This is Book Nine in The Last Plantagenets, a ten-volume narrative history of England from the Peasants' Revolt to the end of the Plantagenet dynasty.