Philippa Langley has done it again. The self-described 61-year-old “housewife from Edinburgh” who led the discovery and exhumation of Richard III’s remains from a car park in Leicester in 2012 has now pulled off another extraordinary feat by claiming to crack what she calls “history’s greatest cold case”: the fate of the princes in the tower.
For decades, historians have debated what happened to Edward V, aged 12, and his nine-year-old brother, Richard, the Duke of York, after they vanished from the Tower of London in 1483. Most support the theory, immortalized by Shakespeare 100 years later, that the brothers were murdered on behalf of their uncle Richard, who had been made protector that year after the death of his brother Edward IV and was subsequently crowned king, with his nephews declared illegitimate.
