The mystery of the princes in the tower: murdid Richard III really murder his nephews or did they survive?
Nearly 200 years after they disappeared, two small skeletons were found in a wooden box at the historic tower and reburied at Westminster Abbey.
The remains were believed, but never proved, to be those of the two brothers — heir to the throne Edward, 12, and Richard, nine, the sons of King Edward IV of England, who were reputedly murdered at the behest of their uncle, Richard Duke of Gloucester.
William Shakespeare later immortalised him in Richard III as a scheming hunchback who did away with his royal nephews so he could take the crown himself, sealing his reputation as a child killer.
Now British author Philippa Langley, who helped unearth Richard's body from a central England carpark in 2012, has claimed that the princes — far from being killed — actually survived.
The elder prince, Edward, was heir to the throne at the time of his disappearance and would have ruled as King Edward V of England.
Langley decided to delve into the mystery after coming to believe that the conventional narrative in which Richard had the young princes killed smacked of 'history being written by the victors'.
She was finally spurred into action after reading an article about Richard's reburial at Leicester Cathedral in 2015 which questioned whether the nation should honour a 'child killer'.
'I think I'd always realised that the story sort of developed during the reign of the Tudors,' she said, adding that it was then 'repeated and repeated over time' until it became 'truth and fact'.
Tudor mud
The last English king to die in battle, Richard ruled from 1483 until his brutal death at the Battle of Bosworth near Leicester in 1485, aged 32.
Bosworth was the last major conflict in the Wars of the Roses and changed the course of English history because the Tudor dynasty of Henry VII captured the crown from Richard's Plantagenets.
Langley attributes the accepted story that Richard had the boys murdered to King Henry VII, a 'very, very intelligent individual, but suspicious and highly paranoid'.
'He had a massive spy network working for him. And he was able to completely control the narrative,' she said, adding that Richard ended up 'covered in Tudor mud'.
An undated handout picture released on February 4, 2013 from the University of Leicester shows the skeleton of king Richard III found at the Grey Friars Church excavation site in Leicester. — AFP pic
Taking a cold case review approach to the historical 'whodunnit', Langley says she assembled a group of investigative specialists, including police and lawyers, to advise her.
'They said: 'Look, if you haven't got any confirmed, identified bodies, then it has to be a missing persons investigation and you have to follow that methodology'.
'They said: 'You have to actively look for evidence'. That's when it really started to get interesting.'
Langley put out an appeal for volunteers to scour archives, only to be inundated with offers of help from people ranging from ordinary citizens to medieval historians.
The result was the decade-long Missing Princes Project which she says unearthed a significant amount of information pointing to the survival of both young princes.
Survival theory
Langley now believes that it is up to Richard's detractors to disprove the survival thesis, which she outlines in the new book 'The Princes in the Tower: Solving History's Greatest Cold Case'.
'The onus is now on them to find the evidence that the boys died.
'They cannot say Richard III murdered the princes in the tower any more because we found numerous proofs of life everywhere,' she said.
Key to Langley's conviction that both boys survived are documents discovered supporting a rebellion by 'Edward IV's son'.
During the rebellion in 1487, Lambert Simnel, a pretender to the throne who came forward after Richard's death, was crowned in Dublin.
According to fresh references found by the project, the boy was 'called' or said to be 'a son of King Edward', which she believes points to Simnel being the elder prince, son of Edward IV.
The reaction to Langley's research has been mixed.
Michael Dobson, director and a professor of Shakespeare studies at the University of Birmingham's Shakespeare Institute, expressed scepticism.
'Given the ways of dynastic monarchy, I think Richard would have been taking a very big risk in leaving those princes alive,' he said.
'The chances of their having accidentally gone missing while incarcerated on his orders in the Tower of London seem pretty remote.' — AFP
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Malay Mail
9 hours ago
- Malay Mail
London teens get life for brutal gang-linked killing of 14-year-old on bus
LONDON, July 26 — A British judge yesterday sentenced two teenagers to life in prison, with a minimum term of 15 years, for stabbing to death a 14-year-old boy on a London bus earlier this year. The attack in January reignited debates around gang violence and the ongoing problem of knife crime that has plagued the British capital and other UK cities for years. On January 7, Kelyan Bokassa was stabbed 27 times with machetes on the bus in Woolwich in southeast London. He later died from his injuries, after the arrival of emergency services. The attackers, aged 16 and 15 at the time, were arrested later that month. They pleaded guilty to the murder in May. A judge at London's Old Bailey court sentenced the pair to life in prison, ordering they be considered for parole after 15 years and 110 days in detention. One boy was as a 'victim of child criminal exploitation,' said judge Mark Lucraft, adding that he had faced 'a history of trauma'. The second boy was also exploited by gangs from the age of 12 and experienced 'undiagnosed developmental needs,' the judge said. 'It is sadly an all too frequent senseless loss of yet another young life to the horrors of knife crime' which 'no sentence of a court can ever truly reflect,' Lucraft said. Kelyan's mother Marie Bokassa addressed the court, asking 'how can children behave like this?' 'What have the children been exposed to, to show such behaviour as this?' she added. Shortly after the murder, the victim's mother had told the press that her son was also exploited by gangs in the Woolwich area of southeast London. Last year, 10 teenagers were fatally stabbed in London, after 18 in 2023, according to the Met Police. In September 2024, a 15-year-old boy, reportedly a close friend of Kelyan, was also stabbed to death in Woolwich, in what a prosecutor described as a gang retaliation linked to a turf war. — AFP
Free Malaysia Today
13 hours ago
- Free Malaysia Today
Suspected snatch thief beaten to death in Cheras
Kajang police chief Naazron Abdul Yusof said police arrested eight men to assist in the investigation. (Facebook pic) PETALING JAYA : A man believed to be a foreigner was confirmed dead after being beaten by members of the public while attempting to rob a kindergarten teacher in a residential area near Batu 9, Cheras, on Tuesday. Kajang police chief Naazron Abdul Yusof said his department received an emergency call from the public at 11.10am. 'Personnel from the Batu 9 Cheras police station went to the location and found a man lying injured and unconscious,' Bernama reported him as saying. A medical team that arrived shortly afterwards confirmed the man had died, believed to have been beaten by members of the public. Naazron said police arrested eight men, aged between 22 and 72, in the evening to assist in the investigation. They have been remanded for six days from July 23. The case is being investigated under Section 302 of the Penal Code for murder, which provides for the death penalty or 30 to 40 years' imprisonment and no less than 12 strokes of the rotan, upon conviction.
Malay Mail
a day ago
- Malay Mail
One year after Southport, Epping protests spark fears of new summer riots in UK amid migrant anger
EPPING, July 25 — Concern is mounting that recent violent anti-immigrant protests could herald a new summer of unrest, a year after the UK was rocked by its worst riots in decades. Police have arrested 16 people since protests flared last week outside a hotel housing asylum seekers in the town of Epping, northeast of London. In one demonstration, eight police officers were injured. The unrest was 'not just a troubling one-off', said the chairwoman of the Police Federation, Tiff Lynch. 'It was a signal flare. A reminder of how little it takes for tensions to erupt and how ill-prepared we remain to deal with it,' she wrote in the Daily Telegraph. Protestors shouted 'save our children' and 'send them home', while banners called for the expulsion of 'foreign criminals'. Cabinet minister Jonathan Reynolds on Thursday urged people not to speculate or exaggerate the situation, saying 'the government, all the key agencies, the police, they prepare for all situations. 'I understand the frustrations people have,' he told Sky News. The government was trying to fix the problem and that the number of hotels occupied by asylum seekers had dropped from 400 to 200, he added. The issue of thousands of irregular migrants arriving in small boats across the Channel, coupled with the UK's worsening economy, has triggered rising anger among some Britons. Such sentiments have been amplified by inflammatory messaging on social networks, fuelled by far-right activists. Almost exactly a year ago on July 29, 2024, three young girls were stabbed to death in a frenzied attack in northwestern Southport. The shocking killings stoked days of riots across the country after false reports that the killer — a UK-born teenager whose family came to the country from Rwanda after the 1994 genocide — was a migrant. Nearly 24,000 migrants have made the perilous journey across the Channel so far in 2025, the highest-ever tally at this point in a year. The issue has become politically perilous, putting pressure on Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer's centre-left government, as the anti-immigrant, far-right Reform UK party rises in the polls. 'More unrest likely' The Epping protests were stirred after a 38-year-old asylum seeker, who only arrived in Britain in late June, was arrested and charged with three counts of sexual assault. Images from the protests have gone viral on social networks, mirroring what happened last July. But Epping residents have maintained that the protests are being fuelled by people from outside the community. 'These violent scenes ... are not Epping, and they are not what we stand for,' the Conservative MP for Epping, Neil Hudson, told parliament Monday. While calm was restored to Epping, a middle-class suburban town with a population of 12,000, tensions remain palpable. 'This is the first time something like this has happened,' one local who lives close to the Bell Hotel told AFP, asking not to be named. 'The issue is not the hotel, but extremists applying a political ideology,' he added. Late on Thursday, the hotel, cordoned off behind barriers, was again the centre of a protest involving dozens of people, with police making one arrest. With another protest expected on Sunday, the local council voted through a motion to demand the government no longer house asylum seekers at the hotel. The UK is 'likely to see more racist riots take place this summer', said Aurelien Mondon, politics professor and expert on far-right and reactionary discourse at Bath University. Anti-immigrant protests have already erupted elsewhere, with demonstrations in the southeastern town of Diss in Norfolk outside a similar hotel on Monday. Last month, clashes flared for several days in the town of Ballymena in Northern Ireland after two teenagers with Romanian roots were arrested for the alleged attempted rape of a young girl. 'Civil disobedience' 'It is well documented that many of the protests we are witnessing are not the result of grassroots, local movements,' Mondon said. 'Social media plays a role and facilitates coordination amongst extreme-right groups,' but it is 'also crucial not to exaggerate' its power, he added. High-profile far-right activist Tommy Robinson, who was blamed for stoking the Southport unrest, announced he would be in Epping on Sunday, before later seeming to scrap the plan. The firebrand anti-Islam campaigner has just been freed from jail after spreading fake news about a Syrian immigrant, but faces trial on a separate issue in 2026. 'I don't think anybody in London even understands just how close we are to civil disobedience on a vast scale,' said Reform leader Nigel Farage. 'Most of the people outside that hotel in Epping weren't far right or far left,' he said, they 'were just genuinely concerned families'. — AFP
