Did Richard III really kill his nephews?

The question is tearing historians apart

As far as cold cases go, England’s oldest cold case is as hot as ever.

For more than five centuries, historians and amateur sleuths alike have speculated endlessly about what happened to 12-year-old uncrowned King Edward and his nine-year-old brother Richard after they disappeared from the Tower of London in 1483.

The prime suspect has always been their paternal uncle, Richard III, who had ample means, motive, and opportunity to murder his nephews in order to strengthen his own claim to the throne. Meanwhile, a group of his supporters have argued passionately that there’s hardly enough evidence.

This debate sparked to life again recently with the airing of a British documentary detailing what it called a “smoking gun” and the United Kingdom’s National Archives hailed as an “extraordinary new clue.”

The evidence in question was actually discovered in 2023, when University of Huddersfield professor Tim Thornton was digging through obscure registries at the National Archives. Thornton came across a fascinating tidbit in the 1522 will of Lady Margaret Capell: The wealthy widow had bequeathed her son a chain “which was young King Edward the V’s.”

For the two princes who disappeared without a trace, this is, in fact, a trace. “The hair stood up on the back of my neck,” recalls Thornton, “because it’s an important personal possession that symbolizes the king.”

How did Capell come to own the chain? For that, Thornton started digging for connections and found one that he detailed in a recent study: Capell was the sister-in-law of James Tyrrell, King Richard’s top henchman whom many believe committed the dirty deed on his boss’s orders. “Very simply, we now have the victim’s jewelry in the hands of the prime suspect’s family,” says Thornton.

For those already convinced the monarch is guilty, it’s a nail in the coffin. However, for the defenders of Richard III—known as “Richardians”—it proves nothing, least of all murder.

Who is right? We asked both camps about the evidence they say backs up their theories—and what proof, if any, would solve the mystery of princes in the tower once and for all.

Theory 1: Richard III is indeed very guilty of murdering his nephews

We have William Shakespeare to thank for the enduring image of Richard as greedy, murderous, and even monstrous thanks to an exaggerated description of him as having a hunchback. “Now is the winter of our discontent,” begins his play Richard III’s iconic monologue, where the titular character describes himself as “subtle, false, and treacherous” and “determined to prove a villain.”

Published a century after the princes went missing, Shakespeare’s play cranked up the drama that had emerged after the 1557 publication of Thomas More’s book, The History of King Richard the Third.

According to More, King Richard gave the murder order to his henchman James Tyrrell, who in turn outsourced the task to Miles Forest and John Dighton. The two men supposedly snuck into the princes’ bedroom at midnight and “bewrapped them and entangled them, keeping down by force the featherbed and pillows hard unto their mouths, that within a while, smothered and stifled, their breath failing, they gave up to God their innocent souls.”

Though it relied on hearsay, More’s book is “still as good an account as we have,” says historian Michael Hicks, author of Richard III: The Self-Made Man.

Thornton’s discovery fits seamlessly into this account. “The implication here is that [Forest and Dighton] pillaged the chain from the chamber,” says Hicks. The chain may have served a pragmatic purpose. “My suspicion is that Tyrrell needed some kind of proof that the deed had been done to completion and what better piece of jewelry to take than this symbolic chain?” asks Thornton.

James Tyrrell allegedly later confessed—under torture—to his part in the princes’ murders, though any record of the confession has been lost. “I’ve been looking for Tyrrell’s confession for 40 years,” says Hicks.

Theory 2: Richard III is the victim of a smear campaign

In 2012, amateur historian Philippa Langley famously discovered the bones of King Richard III buried beneath a Leicester parking lot—demonstrating in one fell swoop that our conventional wisdom about the king was not entirely accurate.

“For years, I was ridiculed and mocked,” she says. “Everybody said, We all know what happened to Richard: he was exhumed, his stone coffin became a horse trough and his remains were thrown into the river.” They were wrong and Richard’s bones were right where Langley’s research suggested they’d be. The bones further revealed not a monstrous hunchback but a case of childhood scoliosis.

Thornton’s discovery doesn’t change Langley’s position on Richard. “In no way, shape, or form does this chain solve anything,” she says. “They’re making huge leaps, from this to this to this, to try and shoehorn it into the same old story.”

Indeed, taking the chain to be a “smoking gun” requires many assumptions, firstly that this chain was ever owned by the young prince. “Invented family stories get told and retold until the story becomes almost a certainty,” says historian Matthew Lewis, author of Richard III: Loyalty Binds Me. “Just because someone says this chain once belonged to a prince doesn’t mean it did.”

Even if it was, a chain is not necessarily the chain. The Channel 5 documentary about Thornton’s discovery zoomed in repeatedly on the jewelry worn in a portrait of the missing princes made in 1879—almost 400 years after their disappearance. “That’s not even a chain, that’s a collar of office and it’s very different,” says Langley. “I wish the media would be more critical about what they present to the public.”

Whatever you call it, the chain could have landed in Lady Margaret Capell’s hands in any number of ways. “London in 1500 isn’t the same as London now,” says Chris Skidmore, a Tudor scholar who wrote a biography of Richard III. “The gentry is a very tight-knit community, and they all marry each other.” That Capell’s older half-sister was the wife of Tyrell is perhaps not so close at all.

The biggest assumption, of course, is that the princes actually were murdered. Plenty of Richardians—including Lewis and Langley—believe the princes in the tower survived.Langley’s new archeological adventure, The Missing Princes Project, seeks to prove the princes lived on to return and attempt to reclaim the throne in the 1480s and 90s.

What evidence could help crack this case?

Modern science could potentially resolve some of these questions.

In 1674, a pair of child-sized skeletons were found buried beneath a staircase in the Tower of London. Given the prevailing theories about their murder, the bones were assumed to be the princes and moved to Westminster Abbey, where they remain to this day.

Inscribed in Latin on the urn, a familiar story literally written in stone: “Here lie the relics of Edward V, King of England, and Richard, Duke of York. These brothers being confined in the Tower of London, and there stifled with pillows, were privately and meanly buried, by the order of their perfidious uncle Richard the Usurper.”

A DNA test of the bones could confirm the death of the princes, but Queen Elizabeth II repeatedly denied the request to disturb the bones.Said to be less squeamish than his mother, King Charles could allow a new investigation.

However, historians on either side of the debate cannot agree on whether they should.

Langley is keen for King Charles’ go-ahead. “I want him to do it tomorrow, because I know it’s not them,” she says.

Others are less sure. “It would be wonderful to answer the question, ‘Are these the princes in the tower?’” says Lewis. “The problem is, without testing every one of hundreds of fragments of bones, we might not.”

Hicks, who opposes disturbing the remains, agrees. “The bones have already been corrupted. Anything they found wouldn’t be conclusive, and even if it was, we still won’t know how they died or who did it.”

But should the testing ever take place—and should it prove the princes lived past their uncle’s death—it could at last exonerate Richard III and put an end to centuries of speculation.