Or it was laundry day and he had nothing else clean to wear.
I just read
The Princes in the Tower: Solving History’s Greatest Cold Case
First the bones in the urn- the 1933 pictures were given to two teams of top of the line experts- (without telling them when they were looking at). Both agree 2- or maybe 3 young people. One expert said the oldest was likely female, the others said there was no way to reliably tell sex. However, they did have missing teeth from birth, which is a congenital issue- one that RIII did not have nor anyone else they could connect. That is not conclusive, just evidence.
In the Urn, there was no velvet, just bones. However, when the bones were first discovered they were thrown on a trash heap, and laid there for a while, and when recovered by orders of the King there there animal bones mixed in. No records from the original finding were kept, but there is a note in a heraldic book from that time that did mention pieces of velvet, which might be related to the finding and could be the source of the velvet myth. Or the fact the bones were tossed on a trash heap.
One other set of bones of a young person was found, and carbon dated to the late iron age, about the time they built the original building on the site. It wasnt uncommon to sacrifice a person and bury them in the foundations.
By the way -f the More account is to be believed- and I don’t- then those bones are NOT the “princes” since Sir Thomas Mores draft writings- found 7 years after he was dead said that the bones were originally stuffed under a stair- then taken out and reburied someplace else. Or perhaps tossed in the sea. More’s writings that covered the Princes were clearly a draft, and discovered after his death.
And Tyrell- he was not executed for the Murder of the Princes, but for treason on a unrelated issue.
I don’t know much about the Tower of London but what I do know is that it is directly adjacent to a river that people have been dumping murder victims into for millennia. Why would you hide the bodies under stairs when you could just chuck them out a window?
Good point- you’d only do that if you wanted to get them later and put them elsewhere.
But those bodies? My guess they are very old, as old as the tower and one is a female.
Maybe if you chucked them out a window they’d be more likely to be found sooner than you wanted them found?
Bodies dumped into a river might wash out to sea and disappear before anybody sees them – but they might not.
I had assumed that the book was a companion piece to the documentary I watched, but from your description of it I’m no longer so sure. I did a little checking and the Langley documentary is on YouTube, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are territory restrictions. Still, only one way to find out - here’s the link.
j
Video unavailable. Were they saying it was RIII?
Ehhh - I thought that might be the case. No - Philippa would never suggest such a thing. 
- My memory of it, in brief, was upthread.
My memory is that there were a couple of bits of reasonably persuasive documentary evidence. Maybe you can find it on streaming?
j
That book also agrees that the princes lived on for a while.
More Research. Tyrell wasnt executed for murdering the princes, he was arrested “questioned”, and executed without a trial (somesay) for treason. He also had great honors under Henry7. There is no record of any confession.
The History of King Richard iii, supposedly written by More, wasnt published until 1557, over 20 years after Mores death. It contains a good number of factual errors, but to be fair, was only a rough draft.
Maybe RIII did kill the Princes, but H7 certainly murdered every other possible claimant to the throne*, including Edward, Earl of Warwick whom RII was said to have named as his heir.
- except a couple that H8 killed.
In the U.S. the documentary is on PBS in the “Secrets of the Dead” series. You’ll probably need the PBS Passport streaming service to see it.
I watched it a while ago and iirc, the main idea is that at least one of the Princes survived and lived to adulthood trying to get support to retake the throne. This is based on some thin documentary evidence, imho.
Hmm. I will have to look for that.Sounds interesting. I admit “thin evidence” seems to cover everything about the Princes’ death.
To clarify, this is not the Lucy Worsley show I posted about,
My understanding is that holding people hostage was a tried and true method of ensuring loyalty, through much of history. I also know that, in modern day, dealing with any sort of kidnapper means regularly establishing the health and life of those being held.
If Richard wanted to use his control over the boys to influence others, he had a motive to ensure that it was public knowledge that they were alive and healthy. Likewise, if he wanted to play the role that he was just “taking care” of the Kingdom while that gained maturity.
There’s no real benefit to Richard of keeping them and their status secret in any case where he would want to keep them alive. If they died of natural causes or by someone else’s hands, he would likewise have a motive to have that investigated and the results publicized, if his motivations were to keep them alive.
A black hole from which information doesn’t escape doesn’t seem to me like the environment that’s created by a person who wants to keep the kids alive. Rather, it seems like one that you create - a la Navalny - to warn people of the slow and drawn out death that they will look forward to, helpless in your malicious tentacles.
If they were a danger to him, all he had to do is say they died of some disease- extremely common- and display their bodies.