The news arrived at Ludlow Castle on April 14th, 1483. Twelve-year-old Edward was told that his father, King Edward IV, had died five days earlier. The boy understood immediately that every step he took from now on would carry the unbearable weight of a crown he was not ready to wear. His father had planned for this moment.
Until Edward came of age, his uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, would serve as protector of the realm. At first, Richard seemed devoted. He rushed to York Minster and swore his loyalty to the new king. The gesture looked reassuring, but it was a calculated performance.
Edward left Ludlow on April 24th, heading for London to claim his throne. Richard departed York a day earlier, intending to escort his nephew into the capital. Their parties met at Stony Stratford, and that evening, Richard dined warmly with Edward’s guardians, including Earl Rivers and Richard Grey. By morning, the Duke’s true intentions surfaced.
He ordered those same men arrested and sent them north, away from London. Two months later, they were executed. Edward recognized the gravity of his situation. He protested when his uncle clapped the guardians in irons, but his objections were ignored.
Richard dismissed the rest of Edward’s household and escorted the boy personally to London. For a time, it appeared the uncle was genuinely serving as protector. Plans for Edward’s coronation moved forward, though not without a strange delay. The ceremony was postponed from May 4th to June 25th, the same day Richard ordered the executions.
As the weeks passed, Edward watched the trap close around him. In mid-May, he took up residence in the Tower of London, as was custom for monarchs awaiting coronation. On June 16th, his younger brother, Richard of Shrewsbury, joined him. What should have been a royal residence became a gilded cage, and Edward’s uncle held the only key.
The Privy Council pushed for a swift coronation, determined to avoid the lengthy regencies that had weakened previous reigns. But nothing happened. Working quietly, Richard had the coronation postponed indefinitely. Soon, the machinery of propaganda turned against Edward.
A preacher named Dr. Ralph Shaw stood at St. Paul’s Cross and announced a scandalous claim: Edward IV had been secretly married to Lady Eleanor Butler before his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville. Therefore, the preacher concluded, Edward V was illegitimate and had no claim to the throne.
An assembly removed Edward and his cousins from the line of succession and named Richard the rightful king. Parliament made it official with the signing of the Titulus Regius. The Duke of Gloucester became King Richard III. An Italian monk named Dominic Mancini was in England at the time, keeping a careful diary of what he witnessed.
He noticed that the two princes were being deliberately kept out of sight. They had been moved to the Tower’s inner apartments, where few courtiers, far less the public, could see them. By autumn, the boys had almost entirely stopped appearing in public. Mancini recorded something far more disturbing.
Edward was receiving routine visits from a physician, and the doctor reported that the young king was like a victim prepared for sacrifice, confessing and seeking penance because he believed death was facing him. Outside the Tower, Edward’s supporters lost hope. They feared the worst: that the boys were already dead. The theologian Thomas More was the first to record what most people came to believe.
He claimed Edward and his brother were smothered in their beds with pillows. More named Sir James Tyrrell as the agent, aided by Miles Forest and John Dighton, who held the pillows over the boys’ faces. Years later, Tyrrell fell into Henry VII’s hands after supporting another Yorkist challenger. More wrote that Tyrrell confessed before his execution that he had carried out the terrible deed on Richard III’s orders.
News of Edward’s fate spread far. In January 1484, Guillaume de Rochefort addressed France’s Estates General, warning that their own young king, Charles VIII, only 13 years old, could face a similar end. Few doubted that Richard III had orchestrated Edward’s demise. Nearly two centuries later, builders remodeling the Tower unearthed a wooden box beneath a staircase.
Inside lay two small skeletons. In 1678, the presumed remains of Edward V and his brother were sealed in an urn and placed in Westminster Abbey by order of Charles II. At last, the princes received a royal resting place. But was it actually them?
In 1933, experts reopened the urn. Scientists examined the bones and concluded they belonged to two children roughly the same ages as the brothers. Yet the findings raised troubling questions. The bones were mixed with animal remains and rusty nails.
The skeletons were incomplete and showed damage from the original excavation. Critics later argued the inquiry had assumed too much from the start. Investigators focused narrowly on signs of suffocation and never even confirmed whether the bones were male or female. Despite centuries of mystery and debate, no modern scientific testing has been carried out on the bones resting in Westminster Abbey.
No fresh examinations, no forensic upgrades, not even a serious attempt at DNA analysis, assuming usable material still exists. Edward V’s true identity and ultimate fate remain unresolved. Even before the 15th century ended, the mystery had gripped the public imagination. A boy named Lambert Simnel emerged from nowhere and claimed to be Edward V.
He was even crowned King Edward in Dublin. Not long after, Perkin Warbeck appeared in Ireland, claiming to be Edward’s younger brother, Richard of Shrewsbury. Warbeck styled himself King Richard IV and gained powerful backers, including Margaret of York and James IV of Scotland. He launched an invasion, but it failed miserably.
After falling into English custody, he withdrew his claims before his execution. Most historians now agree he was simply a pretender with supporters who had their own interests at heart. In 2021, researchers from the Missing Princes Project made a startling proposal. What if Edward V had actually managed to escape the Tower?
They pointed to a man named John Evans, who simply appeared in Coldridge, Devon around 1484 and received the prestigious title of Lord of the Manor. Meanwhile, the presumed remains sat in Westminster Abbey, sealed in a white marble sarcophagus near Elizabeth I’s grave. Then, in 1789, restoration work at Windsor Castle uncovered the greatest twist of all. Workmen mistakenly opened Edward IV’s vault and found something unexpected.
Beside Edward IV’s tomb lay another enclosure holding two small coffins. The tomb named two children: George and Mary, two of Edward IV’s offspring. But later excavations discovered that George and Mary lay elsewhere in the chapel.
The identity of those coffins’ true occupants remains unknown to this day.
