Now hand in hand two pathetic figures appear. They are victims marked for the slaughter; their tender age and innocence will not save them, for they stand between a bold, unscrupulous man and the throne. You have already made acquaintance with their father, the fourth Edward, he who owed all to the king-maker, whom he left dead on Barnet Field. But Edward has gone to his account, leaving his two young sons and their mother to the tender mercies of selfish, intriguing nobles, brutalized by a long course of civil war. As Protector of the realm, their father’s brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, aims at the throne, and his first step is to secure the custody of the two royal lads, who are now in the guardianship of their maternal uncle, Earl Rivers, and of Lord Richard Grey. The elder—a boy of thirteen—is seized and brought to London by his Uncle Richard, while the lad’s guardians are flung into prison. The false uncle treats his young charge with every show of loyal and submissive regard, and brings him in great state to London for his coronation. The wretched mother knows instinctively the fate in store for her offspring, and takes sanctuary at Westminster with her second son, the little Duke of York, a boy of eleven years of age. With fair and specious words a prince of the Church persuades the widow to surrender the lad, and forthwith he joins his brother in the Tower.

And now Gloucester ruthlessly hurries to the block those who by the ties of kindred and friendship are likely to befriend the boys, and ere long no man dares raise his voice against any of his bloodthirsty acts. He is a dictator—and dictators easily develop into kings. His minions offer him the crown, which, after a slight show of refusal, he accepts. Then with consummate skill he proceeds to bolster up the throne which his successful villainy has won. He is crowned with great pomp and ceremony, and soon after the little princes disappear. What becomes of them is not clearly known, but gradually a rumour spreads that the unnatural uncle has done them to death. His crime profits him little; a great wave of pity for the untimely fate of the unhappy boys swells up in the land, and men recoil in horror from a murderer king. Two years later avenging justice smites him; he lies dead on the battlefield, and another fills his throne.

Sir Thomas More, writing twenty-eight years after Richard’s death, tells the story of the crime, and there is no good reason to dispute its substantial accuracy. He tells us that the king plotted the death of the young princes while making a holiday progress through the country. From Gloucester he dispatched one of his pages to Sir Robert Brackenbury, the governor of the Tower, commanding him to make away with the lads quietly and speedily. Brackenbury indignantly refused the office of assassin, but a more facile tool was found in Sir James Tyrell, who had already stained his hands in secret crime. The princes were confined in the Portcullis Tower, under the constant supervision of four keepers, their personal attendant being a fellow known as Black Will or Will Slaughter.

Richard roused Tyrell from his bed at midnight, and sent him to the Tower with an order commanding Brackenbury to give up the keys of the fortress. “Then,” says Sir Thomas More, “Sir James Tyrell desired that the princes should be murdered in bed, to the execution whereof he appropriated Miles Forest, one of their keepers, a fellow flesh-bred in murder, and to him joined John Dighton, his own horse-keeper, a big, broad, square knave. The young king had certainly a clear apprehension of his fate, for he was heard sighingly to say, ‘I would mine uncle would let me have my life, though he taketh my crown.’ After which time the prince never tied his points nor anything attended to himself, but that young babe, his brother, lingered in thought and heaviness till the traitorous deed delivered them from their wretchedness.

“All their other attendants being removed from them, and the harmless children in bed, these men came into their chamber, and suddenly lapping them in the clothes smothered and stifled them till thoroughly dead. Then laying out their bodies on the bed, they fetched Sir James to see them, who caused the murderers to bury them at the stairfoot, deep in the ground, under a heap of stones. Then rode Sir James in great haste to King Richard, and showed him the manner of the murder, who gave him great thanks.”

More than two centuries later the skeletons of two young lads were found under a staircase leading to the chapel in the White Tower. In all probability they were the mortal remains of the unhappy princes.

On the eve of the battle which resulted in the overthrow and death of the murderer king, Shakespeare depicts him as visited by the ghosts of the many whom he has foully slain. The spirits of the murdered boys appear hand in hand:—

And thus do they hearten the avenger, whose forces are even now marshalled on Bosworth Field:—