To think Richard III clearly murdered the princes in the tower?

I agree OP. Richard had motive, means and opportunity.

If you grabbed the throne, you didn't let your predecessor live.

Little boys grow up and come with an army to kill you so no I don't believe he waved them off to live a quiet life.

He gave the order.

Any Barbara Willard fans? Anyone believe her narrative in ‘A Sprig of Broom’?

I'm sure Henry VII became king after winning Bosworth. And I'm sure Richard III came to a nasty end at Bosworth trussed up, lying over a horse with a pike up his bum 🐴⛏️

And the current royal family are also descendants of Henry’s younger sister Mary.

Fellow Jodi Taylor fan here - I like her theory best 🤣🤣

Ooh I didn’t know that matrilineal descendants had been traced!

The current royal family are no good for DNA testing because, as I understand it, you either need an unbroken matrilineal line (mother to daughter), or an unbroken patrilineal line (father to son). If you have one of those, you can say with certainty ‘these people share a common female/male ancestor’.

But patrilineal lines often don’t work, because there is a reasonable amount children whose biological fathers are different to the husband of their mother.

Just being able to see by a family tree that X person is related to Y person doesn’t help with DNA when the relationship goes through many generations, because there are so many different permutations it wouldn’t be useful.

I suppose just knowing whether or not the children were related to each other would be a start though.

Agree, OP, and with @IfYouLiveInPigeonStreet

Declaring the boys illegitimate didn’t remove that they were a potential threat.

The documentary (youtube) about digging up richard’s body in the car park was great

Those Yorks came through then! One for the white rose.

Margaret Douglas, daughter of Henry’s sister Margaret Tudor. I’ve just finished listening to The Lost Tudor Princess by Alison Weir - a bit hard to keep track of who was who at times, but very very interesting.

Henry VII

One of them married into the Stewarts, arent they then ancestors of the current royal family or did it all go wrong when they brought in the Germans?

If I remember correctly a member of the clergy was the person who raised the issue of the illegitimacy of the princes. Probably didn't come forward when their father was still alive as it would have been dangerous for him to to do this.

Sadly it did her little good bearing in mind the Tudor dynasty. I always get confused about Henry VIIIs sisters and where their lineage ended up.

Am I right that there is a fish and chip shop in Bosworth called the Batter of Bosworth?

I always felt Margaret Beaufort had something to do with it.

Henry married Elizabeth to unite the waring faction and bring things to an end - also as queen she was unlikely to be involved in any future plots against the Tudors

There is no actual evidence that they were murdered at all, by Richard or anyone else. The popular belief that they were murdered by their uncle is based on rumour and hearsay, most of it written after the fact by people who weren’t around, or even alive, at the time, and once Henry VII had come to power and the Tudor propaganda machine had kicked in. We’ve seen very recently in our own time how rumour can quickly turn into scandal when it comes to the royal family.

Don’t get me wrong, they may very well have been murdered, and Richard may have done it, but in the absence of actual evidence it’s only right that when considering the question you should look at all of the possible outcomes and not accept one version of events as the undisputed truth.

Langley is very clearly biased, but I think her work has some merit in that it highlights what’s out there in the world in the way of an alternative narrative. Historians may have been aware of these documents before but the public at large weren’t. There are clear issues with the way the documentary presents them, mostly by ignoring entirely the fact that at least some of them may well have been propaganda pieces themselves to support a challenge to Tudor rule. But we don’t know either way. I’m currently reading her new book, as I find the whole topic fascinating, and I’ll be interested to see if the book considers that possibility.

If Charles ever gives permission to exhume the remains found in the tower, it should be possible to confirm whether or not they are the princes as John Ashdown-Hill, who traced Richard’s DNA, has managed to trace a maternal line of DNA for the princes. I haven’t read his book, but apparently he has examined the reports from the 1930s on the remains and thinks they may be Anglo-Saxon. They apparently also show a genetic dental condition which isn’t present in Richard’s remains which he says makes it less likely they are related. I think he’s a pretty big Ricardian, however, so once again, bias!

Daughter of Time is a brilliant read, highly recommend. I’d also recommend The Sunne in Splendour by Sharon K Penman, it’s fantastic. Highly Ricardian, but I’m fine with an antidote to the Shakespearean version 😁

The paternal line DNA test for Richard didn’t give a match to the apparent paternal line descendant (they suppose due to illegitimacy somewhere). I suppose given presumably the Y-chromosome DNA has been sequenced for Richard you could try to match it. But the chances of finding a fully female line back that far are slim (as evidenced by the fact they only found 1 for Richard III).

Any relations through a mixed male female line I don’t think ‘work’ for this sort of DNA testing? I am prepared to be corrected though, am not an expert.

Henry VII probably did it but he founded the Tudor line so they made sure that history was written to make it look like Richard did it.

I don’t buy it. He was astute and having them disappear served him no purpose; in fact it was likely to mean a lifetime (if he’d lived) of various Pretenders either coming forward or being positioned for the Throne by his detractors. On a personal level, he has been shown to have had a pretty good relationship with his nieces and nephews in prior times and there’s nothing in his general behaviour to suggest he was capable of such a cold-blooded murder of children.

I don’t think it would have been that hard for others to get to the Princes; it was a time of such divided loyalties, one would just have had to pick the right guard!

I thought I read some time ago that Charles has given permission for DNA matching (or did I dream it)

I've often wondered if the Tyrell confession was a way of tying up a loose end so that no one else could pretend to be the princes.

IIRC, the Tyrell confession emerged around the time Henry was negotiating the marriage of Prince Arthur and Catherine of Aragon.

Ferdinand and Isabella: 'How do we know the Tudors are here to stay? Those Princes will be all grown up now and just looking for an opportunity to come and reclaim the throne for the Yorkists. Why should we marry our daughter into some family of Welsh nobodies who could find themselves booted out at any moment?

Henry: 'Funny you should mention that. This just landed on my desk this morning...'

Well if you google, plenty of media sources say that Charles is not opposed…