Edward V

The reign of Edward V lasted less than three months, and he was never crowned. He was born on 2 November 1470 in sanctuary at Westminster Abbey, where his mother Elizabeth Woodville had taken refuge during the brief restoration of Henry VI and the exile of his father, Edward IV. After his father's return to power he was created Prince of Wales, and from 1473 he was brought up at Ludlow Castle at the head of a council governing Wales and the marches, under the supervision of his maternal uncle Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, a noted soldier and man of letters. In 1480 he was betrothed to Anne, heiress of Duke Francis II of Brittany, one of several continental matches projected for Edward IV's children, though it came to nothing.

Edward IV died unexpectedly on 9 April 1483, and the twelve-year-old king set out from Ludlow for his coronation. At Stony Stratford on 30 April his uncle Richard, duke of Gloucester, intercepted the royal party, arrested Rivers and the king's half-brother Richard Grey, and took charge of Edward himself; both arrested men were later executed without trial. The king was lodged in the Tower of London, then a royal residence as well as a fortress, and was joined there in June by his nine-year-old brother Richard, duke of York, surrendered from sanctuary by their mother.

The coronation was repeatedly postponed. In late June it was put about that Edward IV's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville had been invalid because of a prior contract of marriage, rendering the children illegitimate. On 26 June 1483 Gloucester assumed the throne as Richard III, a settlement later confirmed by the parliamentary act Titulus Regius.

Edward and his brother, remembered as the Princes in the Tower, were seen with decreasing frequency during the summer of 1483 and then not at all. Their fate was never established; contemporaries widely believed they had been killed, and rumour fixed responsibility on Richard III, though no conclusive evidence has ever emerged. Bones discovered in the Tower in 1674 were reburied in Westminster Abbey as theirs, but their identity remains unproven.