In later years rumours would hold that they had been smothered with a feather-bed, or drowned in a butt of Malmesy, or poisoned – but these were no more than rumours. We still do not know for certain how the boys died. By November 1483 the assumption driving English politics was that the ‘Princes in the Tower’ (as they are now popularly known) would never be seen alive again. ‘I have seen many men burst into tears and lamentations when mention was made of him after his removal from men’s sight,’ wrote Mancini. By the time the summer’s blaze had ceased to bake the whitewashed walls of the Tower of London, Edward, who, ‘had such dignity in his whole person, and in his face such charm’ had vanished, along with his little brother. ‘The physician Argentine, the last of his attendants whose services the king enjoyed, reported that the young king, like a victim prepared for a sacrifice, sought remission of his sins by daily confession and penance, because he believed that death was facing him.’ Indeed it was. He presumably knew enough either of English history or of human nature – or both – to anticipate his fate. But Dominic Mancini wrote that the princes ‘were withdrawn into the inner apartments of the Tower proper, and day by day began to be seen more rarely behind the bars and windows, till at length they ceased to appear altogether.’Įdward V was twelve and he had been well educated. It was reported in London’s Great Chronicle that they were spotted ‘playing and shooting in the garden of the Tower’, perhaps as late as September 29. Following Hastings’s murder, all the regular servants who had been on hand for Edward V and his brother Richard were removed from the boys’ presence they were paid their last wage on July 9. The last recorded sightings of the Princes in the Tower were in the late summer and early autumn of 1483, in the month that followed their uncle’s seizure of the crown. I think I still stand by all of this today.ĭo you have a pet theory about the Princes? What do you think it would take for the Crown to permit DNA testing on the remains in the urn in Westminster Abbey? Let me know in the comments. It’s on Wednesday at 19.00GMT/15.00EST.Īnyway, this got me wondering exactly what I had written about Richard III and the Princes when I published my book The Hollow Crown (aka The Wars of the Roses ). The History Hit team have asked me to let you know that tickets for the event are available here. This week they’re putting on a live event reviewing the evidence for the fate of the Princes in the Tower, who were murdered (Or were they? Yes they were) in 1483. (As you may have seen in the news, he has been with the expedition that located Ernest Shackleton’s lost ship Endurance, which sank in 1915.)īut in Dan’s absence, his History Hit empire marches on. My friend, sometime colleague and permanent alter-ego Dan Snow has been in the Antarctic recently.
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