Wars of the Roses Thomas Bourchier, the Archbishop of Canterbury, then persuaded Elizabeth Woodville to allow her younger son, the 9-year-old Richard, Duke of York, to join Edward in the Tower. Having secured the boys, Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells then alleged that Edward IV's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville had been illegal and that the two boys were therefore illegitimate. Richard then claimed the crown as King Richard III. The two imprisoned boys, known as the "Princes in the Tower", disappeared and are assumed to have been murdered. There was never a trial or judicial inquest on the matter. Perkin Warbeck claimed
Princes in the Tower implicated in the decision to murder them, the hypothesis that he acted without Richard's knowledge is not widely accepted by historians. While Jeremy Potter suggested that Richard would have kept silent had Buckingham been guilty because nobody would have believed Richard was not party to the crime, he further notes that 'Historians are agreed that Buckingham would never have dared to act without Richard's complicity, or at least, connivance'. However, Potter also hypothesised that perhaps Buckingham was fantasising about seizing the crown himself at this point and saw the murder of the princes as a first step to achieving this