Responsibility for their disappearance (and presumed deaths) is widely attributed to Richard III, who sent them to the Tower, but the lack of conclusive evidence and conflicting contemporary accounts allow for other possibilities.

His mother, Elizabeth Woodville, had sought sanctuary there from Lancastrian supporters who had deposed his father, the Yorkist king Edward IV, during the course of the Wars of the Roses.

Dinner was served from ten in the morning, and then he was to be read "noble stories ... of virtue, honour, cunning, wisdom, and of deeds of worship" but "of nothing that should move or stir him to vice".

Perhaps aware of his own vices, the king was keen to safeguard his son's morals, and instructed Rivers to ensure that no one in the prince's household was a habitual "swearer, brawler, backbiter, common hazarder, adulterer, [or user of] words of ribaldry".

Dominic Mancini reported of the young Edward V: In word and deed he gave so many proofs of his liberal education, of polite nay rather scholarly, attainments far beyond his age; ... his special knowledge of literature ... enabled him to discourse elegantly, to understand fully, and to declaim most excellently from any work whether in verse or prose that came into his hands, unless it were from the more abstruse authors.

The new king left Ludlow on 24 April, with Richard leaving York a day earlier, planning to meet at Northampton and travel to London together.

Dominic Mancini, an Italian who visited England in the 1480s, reports that Edward protested, but the remainder of his entourage was dismissed and Richard escorted him to London.

[15] An alternative theory is that Perkin Warbeck, a pretender to the throne, was indeed Richard, Duke of York, as he claimed, having escaped to Flanders after his uncle's defeat at Bosworth to be raised by his aunt, Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy.

[17] In 2021, researchers from "The Missing Princes Project"[18] claimed to have found evidence that Edward may have lived out his days in the rural Devon village of Coldridge.

They linked the 13-year-old prince with a man named John Evans, who arrived in the village around 1484, and was immediately given an official position and the title of Lord of the Manor.

[19] Researcher John Dike noted Yorkist symbols and stained glass windows depicting Edward V in a Coldridge chapel commissioned by Evans and built around 1511, unusual for the location.

On the orders of King Charles II, these were subsequently placed in Westminster Abbey, in an urn bearing the names of Edward and Richard.

In 1789, workmen carrying out repairs in St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, rediscovered and accidentally broke into the vault of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville.

[33]Three leading members of the Dutch Research Group who had assisted in the project subsequently distanced themselves from Langley's documentary and book, arguing that the documents they had discovered "are in our own opinion open to various interpretations and do not constitute irrefutable proof" for the survival of the princes.

[34] Langley responded that her conclusions were based on "the totality of evidence thus assembled and the outcomes of a modern police missing person investigation methodology ... (and not through a traditional historical research method)".

[35] Historian Michael Hicks said that the new documents "do add to knowledge of the Tudor impostors, but they fall short of proof that either Edward V or Richard Duke of York survived beyond their disappearance in the autumn of 1483".

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; their bones, long enquired after and wished for, after 191 years in the rubbish of the stairs (those lately leading to the Chapel of the White Tower) were on the 17th day of July AD 1674 by undoubted proofs discovered, being buried deep in that place.

Charles II, a most compassionate king, pitying their severe fate, ordered these unhappy princes to be laid amongst the monuments of their predecessors, AD 1678, in the 30th year of his reign.

[38]The original Latin text is as follows (original all in capitals):[39] H.SS Reliquiæ Edwardi Vti Regis Angliæ et Richardi Ducis EboracensisHos, fratres germanos, Turre Londinˢⁱ conclusos iniectisq culcitris suffocatos, abdite et inhoneste tumulari iussit patruus Richardus Perfidus Regni prædo ossa desideratorum, diu et multum quæsita, post annos CXC&1~ scalarum in ruderibus (scalæ istæ ad Sacellum Turris Albæ nuper ducebant) alte defossa, indictis certissimis sunt reperta XVII die iulii Aº Dⁿⁱ MDCLXXIIIICarolus II Rex clementissimus acerbam sortem miseratus inter avita monumena principibus infelicissimis.

†=Killed in action;  =ExecutedSee also Family tree of English monarchs Edward appears as a character in the play Richard III by William Shakespeare.

Gloster, the future Richard III, is at the close of this play already encompassing his nephew's demise, as he mutters in an aside, "To say the truth, so Judas kiss'd his master, And cried – All hail!