 Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by the sun of York. And this, of course, is from William Shakespeare's play Richard the Third. The play opened at the Globe Theatre in 1592, a little over 100 years after the real Richard the Third's death. By today's standards, this play could be seen as propaganda, or as we say now, fake news. The play paints Richard the Third as this hunchbacked, deformed, evil, evil king who most likely murdered his two nephews in order to secure the crown for himself. But now historians are not so sure that was what Richard was like. They're also not 100% sure that King Richard the Third had anything to do with the death of his nephews. But before we go any further, you know what to do. Please hit that subscribe button and give us a like. Also, again, a very, very special thank you to all of our patrons. We're getting new patrons by the day and I could not be more grateful and more appreciative of all you guys that help support this channel. And as always, a very special thank you to our producer, Tiffany Monroe, who is a Reiki master here in Atlanta, Georgia. Her contact information is in the description box below. And I do also want to wish Tiffany a very happy birthday. Her birthday was on Saturday and I hope that she enjoyed her day. If you know Tiffany, go ahead and send her some birthday love. All right, let's get started. Welcome to El Soteric Atlanta. My name is Bryce and today on Mystery Monday, we're going to be talking about the princes in the tower. A couple of weeks ago, we did a Mystery Monday regarding the disappearance of one of King Richard the Third's closest allies and friends. I will put a link to that video in the description box below. Because we went into some detail over the War of the Roses in that video, I'm not going to go through that all over again today. But again, if you do need a refresher on what led up to King Richard the Third and his missing nephews, you might want to go back and rewatch that video first. For today's story, we're going to start with the marriage of King Edward the Fourth, Richard the Third's brother, to a commoner named Elizabeth Woodville. If you remember from our last video, Warwick was one of King Edward the Fourth's strongest allies. He went to battle with King Edward the Yorkist against the Lancasters to put Edward on the throne. Now, we know that throughout history, most marriages within a royal family are done for political power and treaties with other world empires. And we do know that Warwick had been given the nickname the Kingmaker, because he was really good at helping people organize their power and maintain power. Now, after Edward's father and older brother had been killed in a battle previous against the Lancasters, Warwick took over guardianship of George and Richard, Edward's brothers. So these two boys were living in the north of England with Warwick's family. They were learning all the politics, all the rules of war, everything they needed to know to be in a ruling class family. Meanwhile, Warwick was trying to find a suitable wife for King Edward the Fourth. He was working out a treaty with France in order for Edward to marry a French princess when Edward fell in love with a commoner named Elizabeth Woodville. Not only was she a commoner, but she had been married before she was widowed and she had children from her previous marriage. At this time, this was super taboo for the royalty. And not to mention her late husband was a supporter of the Lancasterian dynasty, not the Yorkist. And Edward the Fourth was a Yorkist. Now, at least we all forget the Lancasters in the Yorks all come from King Edward the Third. So they're all cousins. It's the same freaking family. But nonetheless, Edward and Elizabeth fell in love and they got married in secret. Well, this absolutely pissed Warwick off. How dare he marry this commoner who is a widow and has like a stain on her character because her late husband was supporter of the Lancasterian. Well, Warwick then withdrew his support from Edward the Fourth. As you might remember from our last video over the War of the Roses, this is when Warwick went to France and tried to strike up an alliance with Margaret Anjou, who was his like sworn enemy and enemy of the people of England during the Wars of the Roses. Remember Margaret Anjou was married to King Henry the Sixth, who was sitting on the throne when he got kicked off the throne by King Edward the Fourth. Again, they're cousins. It's the same bloodline. I mean, it's the same family. So for the commoners, I don't know how much this really mattered. This was really just a family feud at the end of the day. So anyway, when Warwick got mad at Edward for marrying a commoner and he turned his back on Edward and started to fight against Edward, he was going to take Edward off the throne. Edward's brother George decided to stay with Warwick and support Warwick, whereas Richard the Third, or Richard then, went and supported his brother Edward. Eventually, Warwick was killed in a battle and King Henry the Sixth was placed in the Tower of London. We know that King Henry the Sixth was eventually killed in the Tower of London, as many people have been killed before in the Tower of London, and it is believed that it was Richard the Third on his brother's command that went and killed Henry the Sixth. Just take him out so there would be no other contention or rivalry for the throne. In 1483, 400 years before I was born, and this is my family that I'm talking about, so that's kind of weird, King Edward the Fourth just died. He died unexpectedly. Now King Edward the Fourth and Elizabeth Woodville were extremely fertile. They had a lot of children. Two of those children were boys. One's name was Edward, the oldest boy, and the other's name was Richard. They weren't the oldest children, but they were the oldest boys. At the time of King Edward the Fourth's death, his oldest son Edward was not old enough to reign over England. He was only 12 years old, and his younger brother Richard was only 10. When this happens a lot in our history, we've seen this happen a lot where the king will die and his son or his heir is still considered too young even for those times to be in charge of a whole government system. In their will, even though the son, the young son, will be considered the king, they'll have a region around them, people that will help them rule the country and train them until they become 18 years old, and they can take the reins for themselves. Well, in King Edward the Fourth's will, it stated that if he were to die before his son Edward was old enough to rule England, then King Edward the Fourth's brother would help Edward be his regime, really help guide him until he turned 18. I know this gets really confusing with names because it's King Edward the Fourth and his brother King Richard the Third, and then we have Edward's children who were also Edward and Richard as well. People just weren't very creative back then. Everybody had the same name. Now, this is all well and good in under normal circumstances. The only problem we have here is Edward the Fourth's wife, Elizabeth Woodville. Again, she was the Queen of England until Edward died because she was a commoner. She now becomes the Queen Mother and not the Queen anymore. She loses a lot of her power because her power only was within her husband. And Elizabeth Woodville was smart. She understood that she was not liked by the landcastry inside. She understood that her life was now probably in danger and her children's life was also probably in danger because through her children, that's where the royal bloodline lived. So Elizabeth Woodville, being savvy and smart, went ahead and arranged for her son Edward to be coronated on May the Fourth of 1483. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Woodville took the rest of her children, including her younger son, Richard, to Westminster Abbey where they would be considered safe. Remember in this times, a lot of times, Abbey's and monasteries were like home base. You can't mess with somebody if they're living within a monastery or an Abbey. It was considered a religious place. So she's now in hiding waiting for her older son to be his coronation. So now she has a little bit more power and more safety because even though Edward, her son Edward, wasn't technically old enough to rule, he would still be considered king. So he was not going to let anything happen to his mama or his siblings, right? At this time, Edward, the son Edward, who would become Edward the Fifth, the 12 year old, was with his mother's brother at their estate outside of London. Once they got word that a coronation had been scheduled for May Fourth, Elizabeth Woodville's brother took Edward into London on the way there, Richard, Edward's brother, his other uncle. So Edward, the 12 year old Edward is traveling with his maternal uncle, but then he sees his like paternal uncle coming down on horseback to get Edward the 12 year old. This would not have been super weird because we do know that by Edward the Fourth's will, he wanted his brother Richard to help his son Edward. And so Edward the Fifth, the 12 year old was handed over to his uncle Richard. Soon after that, some of Richard's people went to Elizabeth Woodville at Westminster Abbey and convinced her that her other son, another Richard named, who's 10, he's named after his uncle, but that they needed to take him to the Tower of London as well for their safekeeping. Now the Tower of London wasn't just a place of executions as we know it today. The Tower of London also had apartments in there. And anytime someone was about to be coronated, they would have, they would stay the night in the Tower of London. And so they convinced Elizabeth Woodville that she needed to give her youngest son over to Richard's people so that the youngest son, Richard, the 10 year old, could witness his brother Edward be coronated as King Edward the Fifth. We also have to remember that Elizabeth Woodville and Edward again had many children. Most of them were girls. Edward and Richard were the only two boys. Now, and this time in England, it was the male air that inherited the throne. That is why it was important to have an heir and a spare. You had not just one son, but you pushed for two. Because if the first son died, you needed to make sure that your line stayed on the throne. So therefore you needed to have a second son. At this point, if Edward the Fourth had not had any sons and died, it would have gone to his brother Richard and not any of Edward's daughters. So that was another con to get Elizabeth Woodville to hand over her youngest son. They needed to be protected. Because if anything happened to the 12 year old Edward, the crown would then be passed to his younger brother Richard. This is why I believe Elizabeth Woodville agreed to hand over her 10 year old little boy. It was to protect the throne for her children. Now, a funny thing happened the day before Edward was supposed to be coronated as King Edward the Fifth. A preacher got up and started preaching that both Edward and Richard Edward the Fourth and Elizabeth Woodville's little boys were illegitimate. Were they illegitimate? Not by our standards. Their parents were married when they were born. Again, they weren't even the oldest children. So their parents had been married for a while by the time these two little boys were born. The reason why they were considered illegitimate was because Elizabeth Woodville had been married before and was a widow. Times were very literal back then. And because she already had had a family, this was like a legal loophole. It meant that none of her children then were legalized human beings because you can't then marry again. It's just crazy legal mumbo jumbo, but they were married. So this is just another tactic in this War of the Roses that was still going on at this point. So in one day, one singular day, King Edward the Fourth and Elizabeth Woodville's little boys, Edward the Fifth and Richard, 12 and 10, went from being the heir apparent to the throne to having all of their titles stripped from them and being labeled bastards. This meant that there was no king or queen of England. So if these little boys are not heir to the throne, again, it's now going to go to Edward's brother, Richard the Third. The Tower of London, which was originally there to protect these little boys, turned into their prison. And then pretty soon the two little boys were nowhere to be found. The last recorded sighting of these two little boys was in 1483. They were inside the Tower of London playing outside. They were playing with their bows and arrows as little boys would do totally innocent, totally oblivious to the outside world and the fate that awaited them. Richard and his wife and Neville were coronated on July the 6th of 1483. Now Richard was married to Warwick's daughter, even though Richard chose his brother as in the battle between Warwick and Edward the Fourth. Richard did take his brother side, but he was, however, married to Warwick's daughter. Immediately people in London started to get suspicious. Where were these little princesses? Where did they go? And so they started to question Richard the Third, but he would not answer any of their questions like no comment, like we would say today in the press. Now the interesting thing is that we know they disappeared. We know that they were gone. If the little Edward and Richard, the 12 and the 10 year old, were illegal and therefore were not eligible to inherit the throne, if that were true, then why did they feel the need to get rid of them? Now Richard the Third ruled England for about two years, one of the shortest monarchs to ever sit on the throne. He did have one son with his wife and Neville, but his son also passed away young, leaving no heirs. Now in 1485, Henry Tudor came over and challenged King Richard the Third at the Battle of Bosworth. Henry Tudor killed Richard the Third, taking the crown for himself and starting the Tudor dynasty. Now King Henry the Seventh at this point, he became coordinated as King Henry the Seventh married Elizabeth of York. Elizabeth of York is the sister of the two little princesses that went missing from the tower. She was the oldest child of Edward the Fourth and Elizabeth Woodville. So therefore she was also the niece of King Richard the Third. Now there is a little side story with Elizabeth of York and King Richard the Third, even though that was her paternal uncle. We know these royal people are very incestual. There is a belief that after Anne Neville passed away, Richard the Third was like courting Elizabeth of York, his niece, and there was a bit of a love affair happening, which is really freaking gross. I, gross, like that's disgusting, that's your father's brother. But anyway, Elizabeth of York was then married off to King Henry the Seventh to join the Lancastrian house and the Tudor house together to create the Tudor Rose to then end the War of the Roses. Regarding the princess and the tower and what happened to them, the biggest suspect has always been King Richard the Third. He had the most to gain for those little boys going missing, although there are other theories as well. Richard the Third as a suspect gained a lot of popularity in Shakespeare's play. Again, that was written in 1592. However, we accept now that that play was propaganda. For example, we know that Richard the Third was not deformed. He did not have a hunchback. Richard the Third was very well equipped as a soldier. If he had any deformities like that, he would not have been registered in all these battles that we know he fought in. We also know that for the two years that Richard sat on the throne, he was a pretty good king. He was a pretty righteous king. He followed the law pretty well for the people. So why would the Shakespeare play make him out to be what he wasn't? Well, that's really easy. The monarch on the throne when the Shakespearean play was written was Queen Elizabeth the First. Queen Elizabeth the First was the granddaughter of King Henry the Seventh and Elizabeth of York was her grandmother. King Henry the Seventh's reign started off very shaky because Henry Tudor did not have quite such a claim to the throne as maybe other people did. In fact, Mary Elizabeth of York was a big political move because she was the daughter of King Edward the Fourth, which then gave her children way more credibility through her bloodline. With the propaganda from Shakespeare and also from Sir Thomas Moore about Edward the Third was done intentionally because King Henry the Seventh, Queen Elizabeth the First's grandfather, is also a suspect when it comes to the disappearance of the two little boys in the tower. There is another theory that places King Richard the Third as the boy's ultimate protector. There is a theory that he knew these boys were going to be attacked and so he had them hidden away from the public and then when he was killed by Henry Tudor, Henry Tudor might have been the one to go in and have the little boys murdered because if they weren't illegitimate and Henry Tudor was on the throne and then they popped up alive, well then the crown would have been taken from Henry Tudor and given to Edward the Fourth's sons and it's not like they could just promise to stay in hiding because these little boys if they had had sons could then come and challenge any of Henry Tudor's heirs which would have been his son King Henry the Eighth and his daughter Queen Elizabeth the First. So Shakespeare and Sir Thomas Moore had to participate in propaganda or fake news in order to convince not only the people that Richard the Third killed these princes but that they had been killed so therefore there was no competition for the Tudor dynasty which leads us to our third theory which we're going to dive into more next week is that the boys were freed from the tower and lived. There were some people who came up who claimed to be these boys and tried to challenge Henry the Tudor for his throne. Obviously we know from history it didn't work but were they really the little boys? Had the little boys been sent into exile to protect themselves? Now in 1674 two little children's skeletons were found under a staircase at the tower of London. It was immediately assumed that it was the skeletal remains of the little boys, the two princes. Of course in 1674 they did not have the technology that we have today to determine through DNA that they were or were not the two princes. Remember a lot of people died at that tower and in the 1600s they did bury the two skeletons at Westminster Abbey carrying the name of Prince Edward the Fifth and Little Prince Richard. However there was still a big question mark on whether that was them or not and so in 1933 the bones were exhumed. They did test the bones they could tell the ages the ages were the ages of the little boys when they disappeared and they also found something on one of their skulls, something that happened to the skull which would indicate that the little boys had been smothered to death and that's how they were killed which would make sense that's probably the easiest way to murder a child. However a lot of historians and scientists today are not so sure that this was the boys still they think that the team that examined these boys in 1933 were biased and wanted it to be the little boys and so therefore that clouded their judgment and their research for example the team in 1933 didn't even think to check the gender. It could have been two little girls that they were examining and not little boys. Historians and forensic scientists have asked Westminster Abbey recently if they could reexume the bones to recheck them and unfortunately Westminster Abbey has declined so it's still going to stay a big old mystery as to what happened to the little boys. Now in 1996 something really interesting happened. A law school in Indiana decided that they were going to put King Richard III on trial for the murder of his nephews. Now a three judge panel heard the trial and found King Richard III innocent. There was reasonable doubts they couldn't say for sure whether he had anything to do with his nephew's murder or not. So I guess legally in the United States Richard III is innocent of his charges although they did say the same thing about O.J. Simpson too so there you go. So what do you think what do you think happened to the princes in the tower? What do you think about Richard III or do you think it was Henry Tudor? What do you think happened to those baby boys? I hope you guys are having a wonderful day. Get your popcorn because life is super exciting right now. I'll be back on David Zublick's channel tomorrow to be going over the Gospel of Truth which I'll give a recap on Wednesday of this week. I've got some exciting things in store for this channel. We have some interviews coming up and I'm super excited about the future and going forward. If you would like to purchase our opening song there is a link in the description box below. Thank you again to Josh McKay for doing our music and thank you to Todd Roderick for helping me get this video up and on the internet for all of you. All right be safe out there and have a wonderful day. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.