Well, it seems they won’t allow the inspection of That Urn because it wouldn’t prove whether Richard III, Henry VII or whoever else murdered the boys. See here. No, but it would prove if the remains belong to the boys, and not to the animals and Roman remains that are so strongly suspected.
For heaven’s sake, let us just KNOW what’s in the darned thing! Ricardians already know Richard didn’t do it! Right?
And I’m sorry, but does an almost 13-year-old count as a “little” boy? Not in my opinion. The older one was only weeks from being a teenager! A boy, yes, but definitely not “little”…unless he was exceedingly short.
The implication is always that they were toddlers! And this is surely just to make Richard appear even worse than the lies already perpetrated about him! 
murreyandblue 
Of course DNA testing will not show whodunit. All a coroner is charged with doing is identifying the remains, not discovering the culprit.
I can think of all sorts of ‘what-if’s What if DNA shows that one boy was a Plantagenet, the other one not? And what about those animal bones? Would every scrap of bone in the urn have to be examined? And how can the bones show legitimacy?
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Exactly. But maybe we’d be able to find out if the bones are medieval, maybe even to identifying the 15th century. If they were then two boys who’d always enjoyed a life of plenty maybe we could give at least some consideration about whose remains they are. But as it is…not a chance.
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Edward at Northampton was in a huge amount of face pain and his physician was sent for on Richards advice. In the Tower he was constantly visited day and night because of this. Margaret Beaufort recorded this. Something was very wrong prob impacted wisdom teeth which wld have prob become severely infected.
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I wouldn’t believe Margaret Beaufort if she said black was black, but if Richard sent for the boy’s physician then something was clearly wrong. If it was an infected tooth…having once suffered from that myself I have nothing but sympathy for Edward.
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I don’t believe that this is documented. The reason people have claimed he had face pain is because one of the skulls had signs of jaw disease, assuming the bones were the boys. It is thought it was osteomyelitis, no mention of impacted wisdom teeth. It’s true he was visited by a doctor, so may have been ill, but there were no reports of him showing signs of jaw disease on his entry into London. I haven’t heard that Margaret Beaufort rooted this. Where is it documented, please?
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It’s not a murder mystery.
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The present Queen’s late sister, Princess Margaret, was the first member of the royal family in history to be cremated. Her stated reasons were (paraphrased) “she didn’t want anyone 500 years from now opening up her coffin and examining her remains.” Her reasoning seems pretty valid to me.
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She was entitled to her wish, Gary. But the Church would have suffered a serious dearth of relics if cremation had always been the custom.
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Viscountessw – are you implying that with cremation the church would have been without things that turned them into what today would be called tourist traps to get the unwary to leave money they probably could not afford so the bishops and abbots could live more luxuriously? Heavens!! Next you will inform me that the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience were not what we think they were.
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The first member of the royal family who was cremated was Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, Queen Victoria’s fourth daughter, who died in 1939 at the age of 91. Her ashes are buried in the Royal Burial Ground, Frogmore.
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Laura3514. Thank you for your correction. I do not read on the daily goings on of today’s royals but when something significant happens to one of the major figures I peek in for a few days to some of the British newspapers to read on them. The death of Princess Margaret was one of those events. Do not recall which newspaper I read but the article stated the she was the first royal to ever be cremated and gave the basic reason that I quoted. Should have considered the source before I made a absolute statement.
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The Queen, as a Lancastrian, will never allow the urn to be analyzed. IMO it demonstrates the paranoia still rampant in the House of Windsor, the only significant legacy of Henry VII. We may have a chance of persuading Charles to take this on when he ascends but I believe that the only way to publicize the problem is via lawsuits. From here in Canada I see way too much apathy and disorganization and disinterest (in the UK), to make that happen. It should be such a simple thing to open the urn!
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Lauren, you and I must make an assignation, don our burglar kit and sneak inside. Um, maybe we’ll need a few accomplices to carry the darned thing out and then spirit it away…. A delicious thought, though. Determined Ricardians making off into the night with the “evidence”!
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Tooth abcesses can be painful, even fatal in some circumstances. Edward was visited by a physician, but the records do not say what he suffered from. More diagnosed it is depression. The idea that it was problems with the jaw or teeth depends on the bones in the urn being those of the princes, and that depends on the bones being accepted as those of the princes. See the circular reasoning?
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We know Edward was seen by a doctor while in the Tower, and I thought at once of Elizabeth Woodville also being seen by a doctor while in sanctuary, it was one method she used to pass messages and to find out what was going on in the world so if it was good enough for his Mum, ………
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I have nothing but love and respect for the Queen but was very disappointed in her reaction to the discovery of King Richard III’s body. She should have attended his reburial – he was an anointed King and since 1066 there have only been forty one monarchs of England which is hardly a large number. As it was, only two minor members of The Firm attended – Richard Duke of Gloucester and the Countess of Wessex. It would have been courteous of her to have come or if this was impossible to have sent the Prince of Wales.
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It has been suggested that the Queen is reluctant because she is a ‘Lancastrian,” descended from usurping Henry VII, but also from Elizabeth of York, who was declared bastard by Richard III. But this is nonsense. Examination of the bones would prove nothing as to the legitimacy of their birth.
In any case, her family have been de jure and de facto monarchs ( though not rulers) for centuries now, and nobody is likely to change that. Or wants to.
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On the contrary, it would show the gender, number, relatedness, age, era and even species of the bones according to modern science. If the bones don’t match Elizabeth Roberts’ mtDNA, then the “Princes” aren’t there and several other venues can be searched, but if there is one consistent set and a lot of others, it could easily be Henry Pole the Younger. Unlike his earlier cousins, nobody has ever claimed to be him.
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Quite. But DNA examination will not show if they were legitimate or not. It can show if they were the princes or not, or perhaps if they were upper class or not. If the testing was done and the remains turned out to be peasant kids….that would be a great cosmic joke.
But that is not a likely outcome, just a possibility – one that appeals to my twisted nature, though!
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The “Princes”‘ illegitimacy was a matter of canon law, not of ancestry as in many cases, so that wouldn’t be a part of the equation.
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Blue, that is exactly what I was saying. Also, the species (human) of the bones was determined in the last examination in 1933.
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We don’t know that it was satisfactorily – some of the bones were laid out and called “Edward” and “Richard” from the outset, which assumed rather a lot, but the Tower has been there for two thousand years. Many people have died there in that time but so have their pets, livestock and other animals.
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Is the present Queen really a Lancastrian harbouring residual Tudor paranoia about Henry VII’s dubious claim to the English throne or more of a German with only tenuous links to the original Plantagenet line?
I would also point out that opening coffins and urns, albeit fascinating from the scientific perspective, is deeply disrespectful to Christian folk who firmly believed in the rituals associated with their staunchly held religious views. There seems somehow to be a qualitative difference between digging up a newly found skeleton from a car park and raking through ashes deposited in an urn centuries ago. Perhaps the Queen, also a devout Christian, is sensitive to that concern.
Given that the actor Danny Dyer is reputedly a direct descendent of Edward III, and presumably all the earlier English monarchs as well, perhaps he should be asked for permission to examine the contents of the urn.
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Not satisfactory, of course; especially the assumption that the skeletons could be identified as ‘Edward’ and ‘Richard.’ But there have been incidents when cow bones were identified as human (depending on which bones). Human skulls are quickly identifiable, even by laypersons. I would hope scientists would be a little more rigorous.
Speaking of skulls, I have heard the argument that b/c one of the boys (I forget which one) had congenitally missing teeth, and so did Anne Mowbray (a cousin of sorts). that proves they were the ‘princes.’ But so did Mary of Burgundy, very distantly related, if at all. Was it royal inbreeding? But then, one of the sailors on the “Mary Rose” also had that condition.
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As JA-H showed, Anne Mowbray and her husband had no common ancestor more recent than Edward I, of a mixed line to boot, but her grandfather “Old Talbot” and CF2, the remains most likely to be her aunt Eleanor, had congenitally missing teeth. On the other hand, one both “Princes” were supposed to suffer from it, yet their paternal uncle, who surfaced eight years ago, didn’t.
The bones that were found several times during the seventeenth century, but reburied a least once, were also improbably deeply buried for anyone who had died within two centuries, as people build their civilisation on the foundations of their predecessors.
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