Editing Princes in the Tower (section)

===Early writers===
{{quotebox|
:'''KING RICHARD III'''
:Darest thou resolve to kill a friend of mine?
:'''TYRREL'''
:Ay, my lord;
:But I had rather kill two enemies.
:'''KING RICHARD III'''
:Why, there thou hast it: two deep enemies,
:Foes to my rest and my sweet sleep's disturbers
:Are they that I would have thee deal upon:
:Tyrrel, I mean those bastards in the Tower.
– [[William Shakespeare]]'s ''[[Richard III (play)|King Richard III]]'' (Act IV, scene II)}}
[[Robert Fabyan]]'s ''Chronicles of London'', compiled around 30 years after the princes' disappearance, names Richard as murderer.<ref>{{cite book|last=Fabyan|first=Robert|title=Chronicles of London|year=1902|orig-year=first published 1516|publisher=Clarendon Press|location=Oxford|url=https://archive.org/details/chroniclesoflond00kinguoft|editor=Charles Lethbridge Kingsford}}</ref>

[[Thomas More]] (a Tudor loyalist who had grown up in the household of [[John Morton (cardinal)|John Morton]], an avowed foe of Richard III) wrote The ''History of King Richard III'', c.1513. This identified Sir [[James Tyrrell]] as the murderer, acting on Richard's orders. Tyrrell was the loyal servant of Richard III who is said to have confessed to the murder of the princes before his execution for treason in 1502. In his history, More said that the princes were smothered to death in their beds by two agents of Tyrrell (Miles Forrest and John Dighton) and were then buried "at the stayre foote, metely depe in the grounde vnder a great heape of stones", but were later disinterred and buried in a secret place.<ref> However, there is no actual proof Tyrell ever confessed to being a part of killing the princes and Dighton is accused by Thomas More of confessed to have taken part in the murders, but when More was writing Dighton was a free man. Simply, there is no evidence that they confessed to killing the princes, or even questioned on the princes.[https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/801/kingrichard.pdf?sequence=1 ''The History of King Richard the Third''], by Sir Thomas More.</ref> (''Metely'' is a [[Middle English]] word describing a size as "moderate, normal, average.")<ref>{{Cite web |title=metely |url=https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED27556 |website=Middle English Compendium (umich.edu)}}</ref> Historian Tim Thornton claimed that the sons of Miles Forrest were at court in Henry VIII's England, and Thomas More's contacts with them could have given him the detail of the murder.<ref name="Thornton2020"/><ref>{{Cite magazine|url=https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/did-richard-iii-order-deaths-his-nephews-they-slept-tower-london-180976930/|title=Did Richard III Order the Deaths of His Nephews as They Slept in the Tower of London?|first=Meilan|last=Solly|date=4 February 2021| magazine=Smithsonian Magazine}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.hud.ac.uk/news/2021/february/richard-iii-princes-in-tower-new-study/|title=Richard III's links to 'Princes in the Tower' mystery deepened|website=University of Huddersfield}}</ref>

[[Polydore Vergil]], in his ''Anglica Historia'' (c.1513), also specifies that Tyrrell was the murderer, stating that he "rode sorrowfully to London" and committed the deed with reluctance, upon Richard III's orders, and that Richard himself spread the rumours of the princes' death in the belief that it would discourage rebellion.<ref>Polydore Vergil, ''[http://www.r3.org/bookcase/polydore.html Anglica Historia] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090226004142/http://www.r3.org/bookcase/polydore.html |date=26 February 2009 }}'' 1846 edition, pp. 188–9</ref>

''[[Holinshed's Chronicles]]'', written in the second half of the 16th century, claims that the princes were murdered by Richard III. The chronicles were one of the main sources used by William Shakespeare for his play ''Richard III'', which also portrays Richard as the murderer, in the sense that he commissions Tyrrell to have the boys killed. [[A. J. Pollard]] believes that the chronicle's account reflected the contemporary "standard and accepted account", but that by the time it was written, "propaganda had been transformed into historical fact".<ref name=Pollard>{{cite book|last=Pollard|first=A.J.|title=Richard III and the princes in the tower|year=1991|publisher=Alan Sutton Publishing|isbn=0862996600}}</ref>

More wrote his account with the intention of writing about a moral point rather than a closely mirrored history.<ref>{{cite web|last1=Baker-Smith|first1=Dominic|title=Thomas More|url=https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-more/|website=The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy|publisher=Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University|date=2014}}</ref> While More's account does rely on some firsthand sources, the account is generally taken from other sources. Additionally, More's account is one of the bases for Shakespeare's ''Richard III'', which similarly indicts Richard for murdering the young princes.