The sacrifice of royal children … an old custom or a monstrous act of idiots?!
Prince Harry Returns to England from War Zone
Princes in the Tower
Richard III had eliminated the princes from the succession. However, his hold on the monarchy was not secure, and the existence of the princes would remain a threat as long as they were alive. The boys themselves were ostensibly not a threat on their own, notwithstanding Edward’s having been acclaimed King, but they could have been used by Richard’s enemies as figureheads for rebellion. Rumours of their death were in circulation by late 1483, but Richard never attempted to prove that they were alive by having them seen in public, which strongly suggests that they were dead by then (or at a minimum, not under his control—unlikely, since they would presumably still have been in the Tower). However he did not remain silent on the matter. Raphael Holinshed, in his Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1577) reports that Richard, “what with purging and declaring his innocence concerning the murder of his nephews towards the world, and what with cost to obtain the love and favour of the communaltie (which outwardlie glosed, and openly dissembled with him) … gave prodigally so many and so great rewards, that now both he lacked, and scarce with honesty how to borrow.”[2] Even at that, at the very least, it might have been in his political interest to order an open investigation into the matter. However as the brothers’ protector (having seized the elder boy at Stony Stratford and obtained the younger as ‘protectorate’ from his mother at Westminster), and clearly having failed to ‘protect’ them, he may have wished to avoid accusations of effective blame through incompetence even if the murder had been carried out by other parties. Many modern historians though, including David Starkey,[3] and Michael Hicks,[4] or writers such as Alison Weir,[5] do regard Richard himself as the most likely culprit. There never was a formal accusation against Richard III on the matter; the Bill of Attainder brought by Henry VII made no definitive mention of the Princes in the Tower, but it did include the accusation of “shedding of Infants blood”, which may be an accusation of the Princes’ murder (especially since there are no other “infants” Richard had ever been accused of killing).
