Edward V was only twelve years old when he and his younger brother vanished from history. Most people believe they were murdered by their uncle, King Richard III. But the truth has never been fully confirmed, and centuries later, a discovery in a royal chapel would only deepen the mystery. Edward’s life began in chaos.
His mother gave birth to him on November 2, 1470, while she was in hiding, forced to seek refuge during a bitter dynastic conflict that had temporarily stripped his father, King Edward IV, of the crown. The family’s fortunes soon turned. Edward IV reclaimed the throne, and by June 1471, young Edward was named Prince of Wales. As the king’s eldest son, he was expected to one day wear the crown himself, and his father made sure every detail of his upbringing prepared him for that duty.
With the king busy securing his power, Edward’s education fell to his uncle, Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers. Rivers was the queen’s brother and a celebrated scholar of his time. Under his guidance, the young prince studied governance and courtly conduct. Each morning began with lessons after breakfast, and the king had been explicit about the nature of that instruction.
He demanded virtuous learning, not idle amusement, and ordered that no one in Edward’s household read him stories that might move or stir him to vice. Afternoons were dedicated to physical activity befitting a prince, followed by an early supper served no later than four o’clock. By eight in the evening, servants drew the curtains closed so the boy could rest and begin the routine again the next day. Edward IV also controlled his son’s future in other ways.
He arranged a marriage between Edward and Anne, the heiress to Francis II, Duke of Brittany. Under the agreement, their eldest son would inherit the throne of England, and their second son would inherit the Duchy of Brittany. It was a perfect plan, carefully constructed and meant to secure the dynasty for generations. Then, on April 14, 1483, word reached Ludlow Castle, where Edward was staying, that his father had died suddenly five days earlier.
The boy was twelve years old. From that moment, every step he took carried the weight of a crown he was not ready to wear. Edward IV had anticipated his own death and made arrangements. Until Edward could rule on his own, his uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, would serve as protector.
Gloucester was the late king’s trusted brother. Power, however, has a way of corrupting even the most loyal of men. When Richard learned of his brother’s death, he acted quickly. He rushed to York Minster and swore his loyalty to the new king, a reassuring gesture that may have been nothing more than calculation.
Edward, now technically king of England, left Ludlow on April 24, heading for London to claim his crown. Richard departed from York a day earlier, intending to escort his nephew into the capital. Their parties met at Stony Stratford five days later, and already Gloucester’s behavior raised suspicions. That evening, Richard dined with Edward’s guardians, including Earl Rivers and Richard Grey, the new king’s half-brother.
By morning, however, Richard had set a devious plan in motion. He took Rivers, Grey, and another of Edward’s guardians into custody and sent them north, away from London. Two months later, he ordered the men executed. Despite his youth, Edward understood the gravity of his situation.
He reportedly protested when his uncle clapped his guardians in irons, but his objections did nothing. Gloucester dismissed the rest of Edward’s household and personally escorted the boy king to London. They entered the city together, and for a time, it seemed the duke was truly acting as protector. Plans for Edward’s coronation moved forward, but with a curious delay.
Without explanation, the ceremony was moved from May 4 to June 25, the very day Gloucester had Rivers and the others executed. Slowly, Edward saw what his uncle was doing. In mid-May, he moved into the Tower of London, as was the custom for monarchs before their coronation. Then, on June 16, his younger brother, Richard of Shrewsbury, joined him.
What had once been a regal residence quickly became a gilded cage, and Edward’s uncle held the only key. The Privy Council initially pushed for a swift coronation. They wanted to avoid the long, unstable regencies that had defined the reigns of Richard II and Henry VI. But nothing materialized.
Working quietly behind the scenes, Gloucester managed to have Edward’s coronation postponed indefinitely. By late June, a wave of propaganda turned against the young king. An influential preacher, Dr. Ralph Shaw, stood at the pulpit of St.
Paul’s Cross and made a scandalous claim. Edward IV, he said, had been promised in marriage to Lady Eleanor Butler before ever marrying Elizabeth Woodville. Shaw then concluded that Edward V was illegitimate and had no rightful claim to the throne. After removing Edward and his cousins from the line of succession, an assembly named Richard the rightful heir.
Parliament’s signing of the Titulus Regius made it official. The Duke of Gloucester was now King Richard III. An Italian monk named Dominic Mancini was visiting England at the time and kept a careful diary of what he observed. He noticed that Edward and his brother were being kept deliberately out of sight.
Someone had moved the two princes into the Tower’s inner apartments, where few courtiers, and far fewer members of the public, could see them. By autumn, the boys had all but ceased making public appearances. Some accounts from the period mention two boys, presumably the princes, playing within the Tower grounds shortly after the younger brother arrived. But by the end of the summer, no such sightings were recorded at all.
What was happening inside those walls appeared to be terrifying. According to Mancini, Edward received routine visits from a physician who reported troubling news. The doctor said Edward was like a victim prepared for sacrifice, confessing his sins and seeking penance because he believed death was facing him. Outside the Tower, a power struggle raged.
Historian Morris Keen argued that early opposition to Richard III’s rule sought to rescue Edward and his brother. But as the political battle wore on, Edward’s supporters began to lose hope. They feared the worst, that the boys were already dead. The nineteenth-century writer Clements Markham proposed a likely date for Edward’s demise, suggesting that he and his brother lived until July 1484.
But the theologian St. Thomas More was the first to record what most people believe happened. In his writings, More claimed that Edward and his younger brother were smothered in their beds with pillows. That account passed into popular culture and became the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Richard III, cementing itself as the widely accepted truth.
More did not stop at naming the deed. He pointed fingers. He identified Sir James Tyrrell as the man behind the operation, aided by Miles Forest and John Dighton, who held the pillows over the boys’ faces. Years later, Tyrrell fell into the hands of Henry VII after backing yet another Yorkist challenger.
According to More, Tyrrell admitted before his execution, under some questionable treatment, that he had carried out the terrible deed and that he had acted on Richard III’s command. News of Edward’s fate spread across the English Channel. In January 1484, Guillaume de Rochefort addressed France’s Estates General, urging them to take warning from the boys’ fate. Their own king, Charles VIII, was only thirteen himself.
Even then, there was little doubt in anyone’s mind that Richard III had orchestrated Edward’s demise. Nearly two centuries later, builders remodeling the Tower made a shocking discovery. They unearthed a wooden box beneath a staircase. Inside lay two small skeletons.
In 1678, what were presumed to be the remains of Edward V and his brother Richard of Shrewsbury were sealed in an urn and placed in Westminster Abbey by order of Charles II, granting Edward a royal resting place at last. But was it actually him? In 1933, experts reopened the urn and studied the bones carefully. They concluded that the remains belonged to two children of roughly the same ages as the brothers.
But there were troubling inconsistencies. The presumed bones of Edward and Richard were mixed with animal remains and rusty nails. The skeletons were incomplete and showed damage from the original excavation. Critics later challenged the 1933 inquiry, arguing that it had assumed too much from the outset to be reliable.
Investigators, they claimed, had focused narrowly on signs of suffocation and never even confirmed whether the bones belonged to males or females. A better examination proved even harder to conduct. Despite centuries of mystery, intrigue, and debate, no modern scientific testing has ever 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 a mystery. Even before the end of the fifteenth century, the mystery had gripped the public imagination. During Henry VII’s reign, a boy named Lambert Simnel emerged from nowhere and claimed to be the long-lost Edward V. He was even crowned King Edward in Dublin and called Edward Plantagenet, the seventeenth Earl of Warwick, by those who believed him.
But he was not the only princely pretender. Sometime later, Perkin Warbeck appeared in Ireland claiming to be Edward V’s younger brother, Richard of Shrewsbury. Warbeck styled himself as King Richard IV and gained support from powerful figures like Margaret of York and James IV of Scotland. He put his words into action and launched an invasion, but it failed miserably.
Having fallen into English custody, he withdrew his claims before his sentence of execution was carried out. Most historians now agree he was just a princely poser whose backers had their own interests at heart. In 2021, researchers from the Missing Princes Project made a startling proposal. What if Edward V had managed to escape from the Tower of London?
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. The suggestion raised new questions about what truly happened to the boy king. Meanwhile, nearly two hundred years after the bones were first discovered, King Charles II sought to finally lay Edward V and his brother to rest for good. He ordered their presumed remains to be sealed in a white marble sarcophagus.
To this day, the sarcophagus sits close to Elizabeth I’s final resting place in Westminster Abbey. But a discovery a century later cast doubt on the whole affair. In 1789, restorations at Windsor Castle unearthed the greatest twist in Edward V’s disappearance. By chance, workmen mistakenly opened Edward IV’s vault and found something unexpected.
Beside Edward IV’s tomb, there was another enclosure housing two small coffins. The tomb named two children, George and Mary, two of Edward IV’s own children. However, later excavations found that both George and Mary lay elsewhere in the chapel, leaving the identity of the coffins’ true occupants unknown. The boy king who vanished without a trace still refuses to give up his final secret.
Whether he was smothered in his bed, spirited away to a quiet village, or buried beneath a staircase in the Tower, Edward V remains one of history’s most enduring riddles, a story with no ending, only questions that continue to echo through the centuries.