Strangest fact
Bones thought to be two murdered princes lie in a royal urn in Westminster Abbey, mixed with chicken bones and rusty nails. They have never been DNA tested.
Why it is odd: One of England's biggest mysteries could perhaps be tested, but the bones have not been examined since 1933.
When King Edward IV of England died on April 9, 1483, his elder son became King Edward V at the age of twelve. His uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was made protector, the adult who would rule for him. Edward and his nine-year-old brother Richard, Duke of York, were lodged in the Tower of London, which was then a royal palace as well as a fortress. On June 25, 1483, Edward V was declared deposed and his uncle took the throne as Richard III.
After that summer the boys were not seen in public again. Rumors that they had been murdered spread quickly, even abroad. Until 2023 the only known account of their time in the Tower written at the time was by an Italian visitor, Dominic Mancini, and even that was not rediscovered until 1934, in a library in Lille, France. Later accounts, written after Henry VII defeated Richard III in 1485, blamed Richard, but historians note those writers were working under the new royal family, which had reasons to blacken his name.
In 1674, workmen at the Tower dug up a box with the bones of two children under a staircase of the White Tower. King Charles II accepted them as the princes and had them placed in a marble urn designed by Sir Christopher Wren in Westminster Abbey. Its Latin inscription says the bones were found on the 17th day of July 1674 by undoubted proofs.
The urn was opened on July 6, 1933. The Abbey's archivist Lawrence Tanner, the anatomist William Wright and the dentist George Northcroft examined the bones and concluded they belonged to two children of about twelve and ten, ages that fit the princes. They found animal bones, including chicken bones, and rusty nails mixed in, and many bones were missing or broken. They did not try to find out whether the children were boys or girls. The bones went back into the urn, and no scientific test has been done since. DNA testing has been proposed but not carried out.
The question is still open. In 2023 the writer Philippa Langley, known for leading the search that found Richard III's grave in 2012, published the results of her Missing Princes Project, arguing from documents in European archives that both boys survived and later tried to win back the throne. Other historians and reviewers have challenged her reading of the documents.