More than three hundred years later a group of Richard supporters began trying fervently to change Richard’s reputation. The Richard III Society, founded in 1924, now claims nearly 3,500 members worldwide. Richard’s defenders offer very different views of history. Some blame Richard’s onetime friend the Duke of Buckingham or even Henry VII for killing Edward V and his brother. Others give credence to accounts that say the boys survived, in hiding or in exile in another country. In the 1490s a man showed up in England claiming to be the younger brother, Richard, seeking the throne for himself. His claim was convincing enough (or useful enough) that other European rulers supported him, and he raised a rebel army to fight Henry. His efforts failed, though, and he was eventually hanged for plotting against the king.
One piece of evidence that is almost always cited in this story is the fact that workmen renovating the Tower of London in 1674 found skeletons in a spot that could fit a description of where the boys’ bodies were once buried. (However, the same account that describes that burial place also says a priest later dug them up and moved them.) The skeletons were assumed to be Edward’s and Richard’s; they were moved to Westminster Abbey. In 1933 scientists got permission to unearth the skeletons again to study them closely. Even though the scientists couldn’t actually be sure if the bones belonged to males or females, they concluded that the bones were the right size and age to belong to Edward and Richard if they had been killed in 1483. Everything I read about that study made me wonder what the scientists would have concluded if they hadn’t known ahead of time whose skeletons they were supposedly looking at. And I wonder what scientists now would be able to discover examining the same bones with more-modern techniques—especially DNA testing. (So far, no one’s been allowed to do such tests.) But even if scientists could prove conclusively that those skeletons were Edward’s and Richard’s, we still wouldn’t know how they died.
That pretty much leaves time travel as the only way to completely solve the mystery. And if we could travel back in time to begin solving all the mysteries of history, how could we resist wanting to save all the victims?