Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York (17 August 1473 – c. 1483) was the second son of King Edward IV of England and Elizabeth Woodville.

Richard was born at the Dominican Friary in Shrewsbury on 17 August 1473, the sixth child and second son of reigning King of England Edward IV and his wife Elizabeth Woodville.

[1][4] In January 1476, John de Mowbray, 4th Duke of Norfolk, Earl of Nottingham and Warenne, died leaving his infant daughter Anne as his sole heir.

According to Medieval canon law, the minimum age for marriage was 14 for boys and 12 for girls, but it was not unknown for aristocratic children to be married much younger for political reasons.

[5] The rights of the two co-heirs at law were extinguished; Viscount Berkeley had financial difficulties and King Edward IV paid off and forgave those debts.

[11] In June 1483, the Duke of Gloucester requested that Richard join his brother in the Tower and Queen Elizabeth was forced to hand over the young boy.

A priest, now generally believed to have been Robert Stillington, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, testified that Edward IV had agreed to marry Lady Eleanor Talbot in 1461.

[12] Lady Eleanor was still alive when Edward married Elizabeth Woodville in 1464 and the Regency Council under the late King's brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, concluded that this was a case of bigamy.

[citation needed]The Duke of York was sent to the Tower of London, then a royal residence, by King Richard III in mid-1483, where he was held with his brother.

Four years later,[25] on the orders of the reigning king Charles II, these were subsequently placed in Westminster Abbey, in an urn bearing the names of Edward and Richard.

[28] Paul Murray Kendall, author of the revisionist biography Richard III,[29][30] notes that historian Wilton M. Krogman of the University of Pennsylvania stated that "the skeletons inurned in Westminster Abbey cannot be flatly and incontrovertibly identified as those of the sons of Edward IV".

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

[33][full citation needed] In 1491, in Cork, Perkin Warbeck, a young man of Flemish origin was proclaimed by a variety of Yorkist supporters led by the Irish city's former Mayor John Atwater to be Richard.