Скачать или смотреть Could the two princes have been killed by their uncle?

In the spring of 1483, the sudden death of Edward IV on April 9 ignited a frantic struggle for power that would change the English monarchy forever. By May 4, the young Edward V had reached London, and on May 19, he was moved to the Tower of London to await his coronation. The political tension escalated on June 16, when his nine-year-old brother, Richard of York, was taken from sanctuary at Westminster to join him. This mid-June period marks the final recorded sightings of the brothers playing in the fortress gardens before they were withdrawn into the inner sanctum, eventually vanishing from public view.

The political landscape shifted permanently on June 22, when a public sermon at St. Paul’s Cross declared the children illegitimate based on a supposed secret pre-contract of marriage by their father. This theological and legal maneuver paved the way for their uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, to be petitioned to take the throne on June 25. He officially accepted the crown on June 26, a claim later solidified by the Titulus Regius, which formally stripped the "Princes in the Tower" of their royal status and rights.

The climax of this transition occurred on July 6, 1483, with the lavish coronation of Richard III at Westminster Abbey. It was a ceremony of unprecedented scale, featuring the first joint crowning of a King and Queen in over a century. While Richard and his wife, Anne Neville, walked the red cloth to the high altar, the silence from the Tower grew deafening. By the time Richard embarked on a royal progress through the north later that summer, rumors of the boys' murder were already beginning to destabilize his newly won authority.

The shadow of the missing princes haunted the remainder of Richard’s brief reign, fueling the rebellion that would eventually meet him on the field of battle. His rule ended abruptly on August 22, 1485, at Bosworth Field, where he became the last English king to die in combat. The mystery of the princes survived him, remaining one of history's greatest "cold cases" until the accidental discovery of two small skeletons beneath a Tower staircase in 1674.