Historian who found Richard III under car park claims Princes in the Tower escaped

The Princes in the Tower were not murdered by Richard III but spirited to Europe and later tried to retake the crown, according to new research.

Philippa Langley, the amateur historian credited with finding Richard’s remains under a Leicester car park, has presented a series of “extraordinary discoveries” to back-up her theory.

She believes that a duo dismissed by history as pretenders to the throne – Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, who each launched failed bids to depose Henry VII in the late 15th century – were the real princes.

The two boys, sons of Edward IV and nephews to Richard, disappeared from the record in 1483 after being taken to the Tower of London.

A common theory, dramatised by Shakespeare, is that they were murdered on the orders of their uncle. 

Skeletons discovered under a staircase at the Tower in the 17th century were identified as the princes and moved to Westminster Abbey but have never been DNA-tested.

However, Ms Langley claimed that documents unearthed in European archives point to their escape and subsequent attempts to invade England.

One is an account that is purportedly a witness statement from Richard, the youngest prince, who was nine at the time of his disappearance.

Written a decade later, the author describes being smuggled out of the Tower by Henry and Thomas Percy. 

“They shaved my hair and put a poor and drab shirt on me and we went to St Katharine’s [dock],” the account reads, going on to say that they took a boat and came “ashore in the dunes” at Boulogne-sur-Mer, before travelling on to Portugal.

The document was “absolutely mind-blowing”, said Ms Langley, stating her belief that the level of detail made it unlikely to be a fake. 

Independent experts have authenticated it as being written during that period, although there is no other evidence that Richard was the author.

A second document from 1483, which appears to bear a royal seal and the signature of “Richard, Duke of York”, pledges that Richard will pay 30,000 florins to Duke Albert of Saxony within three months of gaining the English throne.

In 1495, a man claiming to be Richard landed in England with a small army. After fleeing to Scotland, he launched a second invasion in 1497, which resulted in his capture. 

He signed a confession declaring that he was really a boatman’s son named Perkin Warbeck but, according to Ms Langley, it is likely that he really was Richard.

Another document claims that King Maximilian, leader of the Holy Roman Empire, had identified a man as the prince in 1493 by three distinguishing birthmarks.

Ms Langley also presented two documents that she claimed as evidence that Edward, the elder prince who disappeared aged 12, also survived and attempted to reclaim his birthright.

A 1487 French receipt for weapons for a Yorkist invasion of England states that they were to arm troops acting for Margaret of Burgundy, the princes’ aunt. 

The receipt states that the invasion would be led by her nephew, son of Edward IV, who had been “expelled from his dominion”.

The invasion was led by the young Lambert Simnel, who was captured at the Battle of Stoke Field and later pardoned.

History has it that Simnel claimed – or really was – Edward, Earl of Warwick, but the Ms Langley suggests that Simnel was really Edward, the elder prince.

The evidence – collected by some of the 300 volunteers recruited for Ms Langley’s Missing Princes Project – is laid out in a Channel 4 documentary, The Princes in the Tower: The New Evidence, to be broadcast this Saturday.

Ms Langley, who led the successful search to locate the grave of Richard III in 2012 and is a passionate Ricardian, said she expected some historians to disagree with her theories.

However, she said that history should challenge the established narrative. 

“The young historians who get in touch with me through my website are saying: ‘Look, we’ve had enough of just repeating something because a famous writer has said it, we want to start our own questioning,’” she said.

Seeing the documents, she said, had left her “in seventh heaven”.

Emily Shields, commissioning editor at Channel 4, said: “Philippa represents, with her willingness not to accept the established story, everything that Channel 4 is about.

“Philippa has made an extraordinarily compelling case. I think viewers will watch the film and make up their own minds.”

It is unclear how the latest theories fit with a previous claim from the Missing Princes Project, made in 2021, that the elder prince lived out his days in a Devon village under the name John Evans.